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L162 Mumbo Jumbo Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign _ httos://archive.org/details/mumbojumbo00clew Mumbo Jumbo By Henry Clews, Junior BAIN LAND Daley Be Ro Grice: PUBLISHERS os New York Copyright, BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. 1923 Caution—All persons are hereby warned that the play published in this volume is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States and all foreign countries, and is subject to royalty, and anyone presenting said play without the consent of the Author or his recognized agents, will be liable to the penalties by law provided. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA With love which passeth understanding, I dedicate this play to the two most valiant, radiant, generous characters I have ever known: my beautiful and beloved Mother, and my beautiful and beloved Wife. ih ih i ih A Pa i { ae: 6. "I MA , vat ty bran eed eyo) |), Hi y tH y | . i rh 4 Tynes RRS Fe bk fo Oran tie t r. 1u Contents By Way of Introduction Characters Jah an Oe merely. LL t Act III . CULE V's PAGE 62 127 161 198 241 TU ae a > avn ae Aaa Ae ‘ Para An TAN i \ A pr tte him Mumbo Jumbo WANs i ut i A ay tk te he is i } } ay i sé Fa eae tat hi Nae ft 4) aE wth P Ai | ome ll Baal iA Mf By Way of Introduction OTWITHSTANDING the fact that one of the N most-advertised and “Best Seller” magazine philosophers — Charlie Chaplin’s socialistic friend, H. G. Wells or Blasco Ibafiez, or some equally illustrious, democratic, literary financier—has de- clared with the sententious gusto of a furious thinker that the spirit of Gongorism* has vanished for all time, I—although I am possibly the only American who is not a member of some “Celebrated Four,” “World-Famous Six” or “Immortal Dozen’”—never- theless venture to observe that never has this spirit been so universally rampant as it is to-day. In previous decadent epochs of unbridled esthetic luxury, preciosity, which is always the result of pre- tentiousness, over-specialization, self-consciousness, and falsification of values, was restricted to the court and aristocratic circles of great cities. But in our era of mechanical, serialized, department-store luxury it may be found in every slum and village, with rouged lips, face thickly smeared with youthifying, beautifying powders, and bedizened in Futuristic frock, ‘“Slender- izing Corselette,” ““Baby-Louis” heels, imitation pearls, near-silk stockings and Cubist coif, tangoing to Dada- ist orchestral groans and crashes, with “Decolty” bosom glued to “Society Brand Form-fitting Suitings” of butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker, who, with arms crooked into poses of super-genteel, neurotic vul- garity, lips pursed with sweet squeamishness, and little fingers rigidly extended in manicured elegance, squirm 1An affected elegance or euphuism of style, for which the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora and others of his time were noted: called also cultism or preciosity. 1 Mumbo Jumbo and wriggle with mincing step of Jack gentleman and demi-rep. As the over-refinement and inbred thinking of the seventeenth century was symbolized in the aristocratic preciousness of madrigal and minuet, so is the over- vulgarity of our mongrel, democratic, comfort-crazed, third sex epoch of super-palace hotel, sex-equality, sillymental socialism, ‘‘Elite Toilet Paper,” ascetic business and xsthetic plumbing symbolized in the erotic, communal, inverted preciousness of jazz, Cubist art, and free-ass verse, brayed out by neurasthenic femmes du monde, or rather femmes de Ritz, mental parvenus, refined cooks, cultured bottle-washers, and _navel- centric, moon-eyed, pornographic lunatics, suffering from literary claustrophobia, Rimbauditis and Walt Whitmania. In the present democratic decadence, brought about by mass education, commercial science, and automatic power machinery, which have driven humanity from church and artisan shop into factory, where faith, love, chivalry, dignity, respect, mystery and romance have been ground into dust, cultism is not confined to art, literature and choregraphy: all activities and pursuits have been infected by it, including commerce, politics, laws, sports, athletics, and even science itself. If in Moliére’s time it was considered inelegant to refer to a chair as other than a “convenience of con- versation”; so would our fastidious “fan” of to-day find it equally crude and ignorant for his “sphere,” “orb,” “pill” or “‘pellet”? to be simply called a base- ball, or his “wand,” “scepter” and “sacred willow” a bat. And just as Cathos and Madelon in Les Pré- 2 By Way of Introduction cieuses Ridicules re-christened themselves Aminte and Polixéne, in like manner has the world-famous idol of the “diamond” emerged from the proletarian chrysalis of George Herman into the romantic biblical maiden- butterfly of “Babe Ruth.” What modern scarlet-coated M.F.H. would not be shocked, and even pained, to have “the waving of hounds’ sterns” referred to as the “wagging of dogs’ tails”? And would not a fisherman of the Ristigouche élite shudder with indignation at the thought of hav- ing ‘‘caught” instead of “killed” a salmon? Latin purists, even at the moment of Rome’s great- est degeneration, when her literati, through Archaisms, Grecisms, Africanisms, and Plebeianisms, had attained the rarefied summit of pan-ism and perfected incom- prehensibility, would appear almost trite in compari- son to our baseball scribes, sport savants, social ma- hatmas, political messiahs, commercial prophets, and art pontiffs, who in the holy press display such amaz- ing knowledge and erudition in the most labyrinthine forms of finical commonness. And as commonness, owing to its complexity, demands infinitely more fore- thought than does gentle refinement, which springs always from spontaneity and simplicity, it is quite natural that these self-styled *‘Column-Conductors” or “Colyumists” can only be fully appreciated in their more subtle gradations and symbolic flights of vul- gardulianism by their initiates. Vulgarity, which begins where faith leaves off, has of necessity become in our epoch of scepticism, unbe- lief and amorality such a universal cult, that even our bow-wows, dick-birds, pretty-pollies, pussy-cats and 3 Mumbo Jumbo other domestic pets seem to be affected by it. I know of one Colyumist, for instance, who has become world- famous through a literary idyll entitled Archie the Cockroach. What, I wonder, would Fabre, the “Homer of Insects,” that simple, spontaneous poet of poets, have thought of such a choice and euphemistic title as that? To the gross, smug, precious varieties of vulgarity, which have always existed until recently in compara- tively modified phases, the upper urbanites and phari- sees of the last century have added vicious, commercial and scientific vulgarity. With these new forms they are endeavouring to maintain their supremacy over the proletariat, which has been so brutalized by machin- ery, and corrupted by democracy and mass-education, that it can no longer be appealed to or controlled as it was in thoroughbred, aristocratic, pre-power-machine times, by chivalry, nobility of sentiment, and religious idealism—qualities, moreover, almost unknown to the philistinic bourgeois, and rapidly disappearing with churchman, artist, craftsman, peasant, aristocrat and soldier. ) Machine-science and democracy, by annihilating religion, art, aristocracy, peasantry and _ soldiery, have dammed off those sources which, when harmoni- ously intermingled, produce the clearest stream of human happiness. For the soldier, too, has been robbed by science of his brilliant crest and plumage, to be capped instead by a gas mask, and driven like a brown rat into stinking trenches and verminous subterranean dug-outs to such democratic battle-songs as Madelon and Tipperary; while Mothers, Sisters, Sweethearts, 4: By Way of Introduction and Wives are left behind in serried factory rows to turn out poison bombs, organize charity bazaars, com- pete for war decorations, work up “Red Cross Drives” with altruistic old men, who fight and rage against “Peace Offensives” and be courted by food and muni- tion profiteers, pacifists, ‘“‘conscientious objectors,” and rotten-hearted professional trouble makers. And while their compatriots are being slaughtered at the front, these last-named hyenas, in lamb-skins of social- ism, sneak and prowl about in the rear, with hopes of stirring up revolution, or betraying their country into the hands of the enemy, in order to create chaos, and thereby obtain personal power and political control over a people dazed with anguish, and engulfed in help- lessness and despair. These human reptiles and political scavengers have always existed, but to-day, as in all eras of dissolution, they are as thick as maggots in a cheese. They can only succeed, however, if the ground has been pre- viously prepared for them, as it was in the French and the present Russian Revolution, by renegade aristo- crats; for though the plague of revolution breaks out at the bottom, it germinates always at the top, where decadence first appears with unbelief, snobbish senti- mental socialism, sex-inversion and preciousness—the four advance agents of social senescence, declination and chaos. Although the causes of our decadence—the corner- stone of which was laid by James Watt, with his devil- ish invention of the automatic power machine, destined to uninvent civilization—are quite dissimilar to those of former periods of decay, the results are essentially 5 Mumbo Jumbo the same; only, instead of remaining localized, and, as I have previously remarked, restricted to a very limited caste, the proletariat and lower middle class of a greater part of the world have now also become contaminated and poisoned. | In France it was the Illuminists, the “Salonaires,” and their idols the Encyclopedists, headed by Voltaire and Rousseau—those past masters of mischief-making —who unwittingly encouraged Count Mirabeau to open the doors to the sewage rats who brought in the scourge of revolution. In Russia it was Count Tolstoi, Prince Kropotkin and other decadent nobles who pre- pared the way for such intellectual sadists and moral idiots as Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin, Radek and all the other minotaurs and rattlesnakes. We cannot, alas! boast of aristocrats, but we have, nevertheless, hosts of sentimental, decadent burghers, like Messrs. Wells, Barbusse, Bertrand Russell, and Shaw, who, in beautiful—no, costly—homes (Demo- crats and socialists are beauty proof, communists and syndicalists are humanity proof), and surrounded by every conceivable luxury (including even Sealyhams, the most expensive of pets), are industriously planning a dazzling Babouvistic future for us. And as “my dear Wells” has declared that “Lenin is beloved of all that is energetic in Russia,” you may imagine the future! At all events I am energetic enough to consider this as the most fatuously inhuman and pathologically silly statement ever made outside of a mad-house. “My dear Jones,” who seems to be one of the very few regen- erate men alive with a fearless pen in one hand and a sword of virile sentiment in the other, will, I am sure, 6 By Way of Introduction not find that I have been too energetic in this state ment. Bis! bis! Henry Arthur Jones. Many of our “Salonaires” too, or rather “Saloon- aires” and “Ritzonianaires,” especially those whose jewels out-glitter their brains, are doing “their bit,” and rarely lose an opportunity to announce trium- phantly that “the day of the working man is at hand and that he is about to come into his own.” I have often wondered if the “Man in the Mass” realizes to what extent “his p.oletarianship” is wor- shipped by these progressive ladies of leisure and pleasure, whose only knowledge of the filiws populi is through their flunkeys, French chefs and chauffeurs, who impress me as having not only “come into their own,” but into our own as well! What is typical of so many of our ultra-modern chic, cosmopolitanized, Carltonized, Ciro-ized, trans- atlanticized, social-columnized, democratized ladies of fashion is, that when they open their eyes they invari- ably close their hearts, and when their hearts are open their eyes are shut. This lack of co-ordination between eye and heart, which, by the way, also characterizes modern newspaper and bill-board scientists, would ac- count for the rather surprising fact that our smartest communistic weeklies—the editors of which are invari- ably to be found in the smartest houses, eating the smartest food and indulging in the smartest conversa- tion—are practically entirely supported by these high- falutin dames, who mercilessly hold their docile sex- shattered masochistic husbands to dollar-grubbing, in order to have larger jewels, larger houses and larger 7 Mumbo Jumbo dinner-parties, with hopes, no doubt, of thereby fur- thering the sacred cause of socialism. It is also in this orchidaceous, super-“spiffy” “nec pluribus impar” atmosphere that the germ of sex- inversion or perversion first begins to propagate under such weird “‘piffile” as sex-equality and women’s rights; phrases evidently originally concocted by platonic gen- tlemen of falsetto voices and plain maidens on the shady side of middle age. Years ago, a beautiful suffragette, who was suffering from the chic-est mental contagions, endeavoured to convince me that there was absolutely no difference, either mental or physical, between the sexes. She was “carrying on” at the time with her husband and sey- eral lovers. I also remember another radiant penthe- silean who became so incensed at the revolting idea that any possible difference could be considered to exist between man and woman that she armed herself to the teeth with bristling scorn for the poor machine driven, press-ridden, business-crazed, sex-shackled American male, and rushed from magazine to news- ‘paper, crying out: “Are women people?” Personally I have never thought that those women I admired the most were people, and it would be inconceivable for me to think that the women nearest and dearest to me were merely people, like us men. Then, too, the word “people” smacks of collectivism, which is the antithesis of all that is beautiful, noble, generous, sunlit and inspiring. Of course the collectivist could hardly be expected to agree, for although he is apt to refer to his true love as “soul-mate,” in reality he, like the scientist, thinks of her in chemical formulas. Here, 8 By Way of Introduction for instance, is an affectionately domestic inventory, which I have just come across, by a collectivist and modern scientific lover, who declares that his wife with eleven of her friends contain sufficient hydrogen to inflate a balloon of a thousand cubic metres, capable of lifting three or four people. He further illuminates our fancies with the assurance that in his wife there is sufficient carbon to manufacture sixty-five gross of pencils, enough phosphorus to tip eight hundred thou- sand matches, iron for seven large nails, and fat to produce thirteen pounds of candles. Doctor Louis Berman of Columbia University, who declared with ecstasy that “‘the chemistry of the soul’ was a “magnificent phrase,” will probably have another attack of scientific ecstatics if he ever comes across this rhapsody of domestic wealth, which sounds to me more like a pork-packer’s evaluation of one of his swine than a husband’s appreciation of his wife. But then, of course, I am hopelessly unscientific—in fact, so hope- lessly unscientific that I am very sceptical about the experiment which Doctor Hereward Carrington, Direc- tor of the American Psychical Institute Laboratory of New York, proposes to make on an anesthetized cat to determine whether it has a soul. In describing the experiment Professor Carrington says: “We shall place a cat in a glass box just large enough to hold it. This box will then be placed in another glass box five inches larger. The air in the space will be reduced. If the astral body exists, little electrical particles will condense on the surface of the astral body, like dew- drops on the grass.” I don’t know why it is, but every time I think of 9 Mumbo Jumbo Doctor Carrington and his dewdrops on a cat’s soul— and I think of him much more than is good for me, I fear—the following lines repeat themselves over and over again in my mind :— “The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: ‘If this were only cleared away,’ They said, ‘it wouLp be grand.’ ” A psycho-analyst could, no doubt, explain why the Walrus, the Carpenter and Doctor Carrington have become inseparable in my subconsciousness. Notwithstanding the fact that many of my sex have been obliged to dock their combs, clip their spurs, cluck, and even grow hen feathers, I am nevertheless endeavouring to hold on with might and main to all the blessings and sex differences which I received from the hands of the Creator through my well-beloved parents, and I only hope and pray, with all the fervour and power of my instinctively uncollectivistic and passionately sex-differentiating nature (even as to gnats), that I shall always be able to greet His dawn until the day of my death with crest, spur, and at least one cock-a-doodle-doo, even if my crowing does awaken scorn and ridicule among the sleek-sex-equality capons, communistic cuckoos, and sentimental guinea- fowl, who seem to be increasing to an alarming extent. Not so long ago I remember meeting a combination of all three who had been so completely shorn of every 10 By Way of Introduction vestige of cockdom that he actually resented having his charming little blonde hen addressed as “Mrs.,’’ claiming that a husband had no right to ask his wife to renounce her maiden name. Consequently, ever since their marriage, this super-modern epicenian pair of soul-mates have been pecking and clucking about together as Mr. Rooster and Miss Hen. Recently I even heard of a case where an exquisitely beautiful little matron pullet absolutely insisted on being addressed by all her friends as Mr. Cocka-lorum. A strange anomaly indeed! but highly significant of our juiceless, sexless, joyless, standardized world of to-day, where men have turned from romance, individualism, religion and art, to science, collectivism, self-exploita- tion, and the power machine. I can think of no more pathetic and strikingly pitiful sight than a group of stark and wild-eyed militant suffragettes flagellating themselves into sex-frenzy, not, as is generally thought, to obtain the vote—about which women will always remain indifferent—but in reality to goad decadent, mechanized man into his former sense of chivalry, and reawaken, reflame in him the smouldering romantic sex-interest, through which women had inconceivably more influence than they now have by suffrage. For they then directed and even controlled those in power with God-given sex-attraction, instead of with merely man-given vote. I feel sure that the Turkish ladies of the harem are much happier than are our enfranchised love-lorn ladies, who have been encouraged and allowed by sub-men to vote away their divine influence over super-men. The hard, thin, compressed mouth with drooping corners 11 Mumbo Jumbo and the shrill, nasal, querulous voice of the average American woman are tragic tell-tales of her unrequited desire for companionship, love and romance, and the utter sexlessness of her life. I am, however, convinced that, even among the most progressive and Amazonian of our little hens (excluding those, naturally, with androgynal clucks), there is not one who would not drop her vote in the dust and go skedaddling back to roman- tic pre-power-machine days were she to hear the trium- phant trumpeting call of a troubadour cock. But as the unfortunate little twentieth-century pullet is now awakened by a factory whistle, or at best by the patented mechanical crow of a standardized, democratic cock, far be it from me to blame her for pecking about for votes in the modern barn-yard of concrete and cor- rugated iron. Although the air vibrates with assertions that there is little, if any, difference between the sexes, I shall continue nevertheless to think, feel and dream that there exists a world, nay, a universe, of glorious, triumphant, beautiful, exotic, supreme, exquisite, mysterious, infi- nite, everlasting difference, and it is this divine differ- ence which has given us love, hope, art, life—Gop. But let us now resume our analogies of past and present expressions of Gongorism, or self-conscious affectation, which, as I have pointed out, appears with the three already indicated forms of social degenera- tion. How enchanted, for instance, would the Cicisbei and their Mistresses of the Italian precioso period have been with Gayne Adolphus Baron de Meyer’s esoteric photo- graphs of ritualistic powder-puffs, sacramental lingerie, 12 By Way of Introduction and ceremonial hosiery, which this recondite artist suffuses with mystical light, and reproduces over mil- lions of magazine pages for the enlightenment and uplift of millions of beholders. We will quote from one of those millions of uplifted admirers who, on this occa- sion, has alighted on Harper’s Bazar to warble in full-throated rhapsody over the genius of our Baron: ‘Sometimes there blows down on the planet, from the winged winds of destiny, a personality whose force of character . . . an intellectual divination, which pene- trates to the hidden soul of living human beings with the discriminating ability to make this spiritual entity vital and articulate.” Could Marsden Hartley, our informal adventurer in the arts, who informs us that “We have dispensed once for all with the silly notion that a work of art is made by hand,” and that “Art is a matter of scien- tific comprehension,” lilt with more “orchidaceous rarity” about one of his pet photographers or “‘zsthetes of muscular melody”? But listen to what that mis- chievous practical joker, Francis Piccabia, did to poor little Marsden when he caught him on his hobby-horse rocking through the Arts “with the easy grace that becomes any self-respecting humorist,” en route for The New Republic, The Nation or The Freeman, and taught him the following “‘flap-doodling” “spoofalistic” “Dadaism,” or rather Gagaism, which Marsden now solemnly recites in public, believing that “Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to the scientist with eyeglass glued to the microscope” (glass eye glued to microscope would be still more funda- mental, Marsden dear) : 13 Mumbo Jumbo “Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing. It is like your hopes: nothing. Like your Paradise: nothing. Like your idols: nothing. Like your politicians: nothing. Like your heroes: nothing. Like your artists: nothing. Like your religions: nothing.” ‘A litany like this,” declares Marsden, “coming from one of the most notable Dadaists of the day, is too edifying for proper expression.” It was, however, most unfair of Piccabia not to have told Marsden that he had cribbed the above from a poem entitled the Salt Herring, written in Paris almost a half century ago: “To make all serious men mad, mad, mad. And to amuse children little, little, little.” It seems to us that Marsden, like most of our boy- scouts in the Arts, is becoming almost too adventure- some, for if Dada has been able to charm him into thinking that “‘nothing is greater than anything else,” and “that the charm of Dadaism exists mainly in the fact that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of commonplaces,” what would hap- pen were he and his Boswell, Mr. Waldo Frank, to be suddenly confronted with a “Boojum”?—which is an infinitely more dangerous bird than the commercial, domesticated Dada, so popular at present with the modern “Arty” cultist bourgeois who “senses effluvia of souls,” interprets “psychism of patterns” and “‘is vastly oversize as to experience in the spiritual geo- metric of the world.” 14 By Way of Introduction I have often wondered if the Bellman had a pro- phetic realization of the enormous influence he was destined to wield over modern art and literature. As our most famous contemporary artists, poets and critics have inspired themselves with his genius, and as he was the undoubted founder of our modern art schools of “ists” and “isms,” I shall quote a few stanzas from his speech made on presenting his mar- vellous map to the crew—‘‘a map they could all understand.” “The Bellman himself, they all praised to the skies— Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face! He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles, and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply ‘They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes, But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’ (So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best, A perfect and absolute blank.’ 15 Mumbo Jumbo This was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell.” Methinks I hear in that “tingle” the charlatanism, propaganda, self-exploitation and self-conscious pre- ciousness of our epoch. “Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” And we all went unto thee, O Lewis Carroll! And you filled our playrooms with sunbeams, and our hearts with merriment, and later, much later, our minds with the light of your immortal lay and supremely unscien- tific philosophy: “Ah! cruel tree: if I were you, And children climbed me, for their sake, Though it be winter, I would break Into Spring blossoms, white and blue!” Poor Wilde in this poem expresses with rare beauty the unscientific longing of many of us, but the joyous miracle of breaking in mid-winter into Spring blos- soms, white and blue, was reserved for you, Lewis Carroll! But as this is supposed to be a Foreword, I must, as Marsden would say, glue myself to the subject, although I am amazingly far, as any fool may see, from being a scientist,” who, like a barnacle, is so full 1 As the word science is derived from scire, to know, I have always been flabbergasted at the thought of any man having the stupendous cheek to call himself a scientist. 16 By Way of Introduction of natural glue that he cements himself to the first accepted fact in sight, thinking it a rock of truth. His rock of truth, however, usually turns out to be seaweed or rotten log, or ship’s bottom. Carlyle, in his intellectual cruises, must have ob- served quantities of such barnacles clinging to the sides of his ship as he gazed down into “the great deep sacred infinitude of nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as mere super- ficial film.” I shall therefore continue by asking you, gentle reader, if the Atsthetes of Versailles were ever gath- ered around a Clodion or Falconet with more delicate and exquisite appreciation than are our modern beatifi- cally scientific connoisseurs in pictured magazine adver- tisements around “Louis Thirteenth” or “Hepplewhite Cabinet Phonographs”; “Super-refined Select Patri- cian Motor-Cars,” “‘Parnassian Bath-tubs of Snow- drift Enamel” and “Olympian Silentium Water- Closets” in “Motor and Plumbing Salons.” Our illustrative artists of luxe, aristocratic exclu- siveness and chic, are also brilliantly supported, with choice word and elegant phrase, by our pedants of publicity, advertising the very latest sartorial, gastro- nomical and beautifying perfection, “‘savouring of high breeding and fashion’s tiptoe mood of happy anticipations”; as well as every conceivable kind of domestic comfort-contrivance, “which no gentlemen’s home en rapport with best and smartest benefit of discrimination may be without.” How inspiring, for instance, for an initiate of “Golf- olatry” to find in magazine art a “Golf-garbed-by- 17 Mumbo Jumbo Specialist” brother of his belief, wearing “Expressions in Bootery,” and bending in contemplation over a “Kinesthetic Progress Ball, a Gift that carries Dis- tinction,” and to know that in his “Golf Sanctum,” depicted in the distance, cool drinks are awaiting him in “Puritan Polar Bear Ascetic Refrigerators of Opa- lite Glass”; probably thus named not to arouse the attention of Billy Sunday’s over-sensitive anti-alcohol “Breath Tasters.” Were Luther to return to earth, he would, I think, _ discover ere long that more ritual exists in the Golf Chapels of to-day than in the Church of his time; and on finding religion to be a dead issue, and golf a very living one, he would undoubtedly start a reformation movement of Golf Protestants, and put a ban on the luxury of being garbed by specialists; suppress caddy acolytes; discontinue cheating dispensations given to the richest club-members; dispense with votive offer- ings of silver cups; and not permit his followers to indulge in more than two wiggle-waggles while address- ing the sacred ball. These restrictions would unquestionably come as a blessing to a great number of fervents who are suffer- ing from golf preciousness. I know of innumerable cases, not only among the congregations, but also among the higher dignitaries of this sport, who have become quite ill from the apprehension of ‘*Hoodoo Holes.”” There are some, too, who become depressed by sunshine owing to the unfortunate habit of looking for their shadows as they start to drive. There are others who arrive at such hyper-sensitiveness that even a whispered word by an onlooker, at the moment of 18 By Way of Introduction play, may throw them into despair. But those who are unable to control their number of wiggle-waggles, and finally feel themselves compelled to search for imaginary impediments around the ball, suffer, I am told, the keenest of tortures. Had Dante ever seen them he would, I feel sure, have added eternal wiggle-waggling to his list of pun- ishments in the Inferno. Our statesmen, or rather politicians, of big and little stick (statesmen are only produced by monarchial systems), are, however, not to be outstripped by our advertising bards and pictorial psychologists in inti- mate, sweet, and even amorous solicitation of public opinion. Few monarchs have been able to inspire their courtiers with such tender ingratiating smiles of sensuous sycophancy as are worn for mob and kodak by our political courtesans, who, with saccharined oratory of sentimental proletcultural vulgarity, and chattering, flattering familiarity, fish for votes from slum and gutter with hearts, eyes, and stomachs over- flowing with love for “the plain people.” Humorously enough, “the plain people” are now far from considering themselves plain. In fact, I even fear that the vain, avaricious little political jackals, who for years have been “playing big” in 'Teddy-Bear and Royal Bengal tiger-skins, while stuffing the prole- tarian goose with succulent lies of democratic hypoc- risy and emotional refuse scooped out of literary kitch- ens of unsuspecting “ladies and gentlemen bountiful,” 1“Figoism and jealousy are the sources of democracy, which is the cradle of mediocre politicians who, having obtained their votes through charlatanisms, are never respected by the mass.” —RENAN. 19 Mumbo Jumbo are not only going to be done out of their tit-bit, but gobbled up themselves by a “really-truly” Lenin- Trotsky wolf. This crafty, rapacious brute has al- ready gotten a whiff of the enormous pdté de fois gras of folly, vanity, ignorance, and pitiful credulity in store for him. The Bessie Beattys, Clare Sheridans, Mrs. Snow- dens and other parlour coveys of manicured, pedicured, hair-waved, jewelled, perfumed, exquisite, beautiful, high-born, high-brow ladies of satin, silk, lace lingerie, brocades and Soviet sable coats, whose tender, bol- shevized, precious, mundane hearts are constantly breaking in magazine, newspaper, novelette, and auto- biography over love of humanity, plain people, and man in the mass, are no doubt eagerly anticipating the above feast of truffles and foie gras at which, as ladies-in- waiting, they will be able to re-thrill at the ravishing sight of “those sensitive speaking hands of a musician,” and again lose themselves in “that eternal look” in which Bessie tells us in The New Republic, “there was something magnificent . . . high like mountain peaks, strong, sure, enduring.” Alas! lovely lady, if you failed to attain similar heights in Chicherin’s eyes (which is highly probable since you still live to tell the tale), you certainly have attained snow-peaks in mine, for as I gaze up at you in bewildered admiration from the nadir of my valley of shadow, I see that you have ascended in your article on Chicherin to such a rarefied atmosphere of quintessential sentimentality that only New Republican climbers could possibly breathe in it without being seized with altitudinous nausea. 20 By Way of Introduction With your most gracious permission, I shall take the liberty of quoting the following passage from your article:—“‘The Red soldier outside his (Chicherin’s) door set to guard him sometimes falls asleep. The Commissar passes him on tiptoe and says: ‘Sh!! he is sleeping,’ to anyone who walks noisily.” It is certainly now Clare’s turn to trot out Trotsky, her altruistic “man of wit, fire and genius,” her “mag- netic chord to Moscow,” her ‘‘Napoleon of peace’! Poor Mrs. Snowden and her guileless socialistic suffra- getic Philip will no longer be able to repeat their little “stunt” with Lenin, for apparently they have since discovered that what they mistook for love of human- ity in their hero’s eyes was the gleam of paranoia, or manic-depressive insanity, brought on by over-indul- gence in blood lust and excessive delight in torturing his helpless compatriots. It is enough to give the world manic-depressive insanity to think of the millions of innocent victims who have already been slaughtered, starved and fiendishly done to death to gratify the degenerate whims of this sadistic monster, who was recently compared to Jesus Christ by an amazingly fashionable lady writing in an amazingly fashionable magazine. And with untold millions of his countrymen under blood-soaked clod, and the surviving ninety mil- lions living in anguish and horror. Anatoly Maryngoff, a mechanized little hirudine communist, excretes with wriggling parasitical delight the following lines over the May number of Broom:— “We trample filial reverence under foot e ° 21 | Mumbo Jumbo To Hell! Our red cancan is a splendid sight Is not yesterday squashed like a pigeon Under an automobile Rushing madly from a garage?” But before taking leave of you, my bonnie, Bolshevic Bessie, may I suggest that you and your New Republic look into certain works on pathology, wherein you will find accounts of blood-dripping demons, who, after having fondled and tenderly caressed their victims, calmly and deliberately tortured them to death; and then with “Sh! he is sleeping,” “left the room on pointed feet, smiling that things had gone so well,” like the barber of Meridian Street. No doubt they, like Chicherin, considered themselves uplifters and saviours of the human race. I do hope that you and yours will follow my sugges- tion, for, if not, I fear that in the next issue of The New Republic we will probably be told by another fair fashionable ““Red Heart” specialist how Chicherin and Trotsky, with tear-stained cheeks, pass hand in hand from slaughter-house to torture-chamber, exhort- ing their Jack Ketches and Chinese executioners to “Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care; Fashion’d so slenderly, Young and so fair!” Oh! Bessie! I have just seen an entire newspaper page advertising in enormous letters a book entitled, How Little Social Errors Ruined Their Biggest Chance. 22 , By Way of Introduction Do get it and pass it on to The New Republic, for I feel that that “Journal of Opinion” lacks at times the personal and “human, all too human” touch of Town Topics and The Club Fellow; otherwise I find these smart social weeklies amazingly similar in their outlook on humanity. Our prize-fighters, too, whose views on philosophy, domestic love, art and politics are published broadcast, and are now being “broadcasted,” come in for gushing streams of euphuistic adoration and forests of news- paper fame. It would be interesting to know how many hundreds of thousands of beautiful trees have already been sacrificed and turned into machine pulp, to be vomited out by the juggernaut printing press in glorification of such modern heroes as Dempsey’ and Carpentier. Of Siki, the negroid slugger who dethroned Carpen- tier, we know little as yet,” but it will not be long before the Press will be giving us, in editorials, his family history and his thoughts, not only on life, but on after-life as well. He has, I hear, recently honoured 1In the February number of Vanity Fair, two entire pages are consecrated to “Dempsey’s Olympian Attributes.” Our Olym- pian critic Heywood Broun writes: “Like another Siegfried, Dempsey had come through all the dangers which were reared to make him keep his distance. . . . Dempsey paid his tribute to the Brunhilde of the occasion with right hand punches to the jaw.” What modern Olympianism! There are photographs too of Dempsey’s hands, fists, and forearms “showing the combined strength of these dangerous and effective weapons.” On the opposite page, Dempsey is posed as a “Penseur.” Most of our “Penseurs” and critics, methinks, should be posed as Dempseys. 2 Since writing the above, this ebullient, ebony negro has become one of the most conspicuous men on earth. His views and state- ments are cabled around the world. 23 | Mumbo Jumbo an ambassadorial luncheon with his midnight presence. At this moment the front pages of the French Press are devoted to propagating the fame of a certain ogre who is now on trial for his life and will soon become an international figure for having raped, slaughtered, Trotskied, quartered and Lenined a little girl of six to satisfy his delirium of demoniacal passion. ‘Think of how many lovely Socialistic ladies, callous cads, pedantic, perfumed prigs, modern poetasters, artists and smart newspaper editors would now be prostrating themselves at his feet in adoration of his Apollonian genius in uplifting humanity had he butchered ten thousand little girls instead of one! As it is, we may soon expect to see in the Press love-letters and poems written to him by his Bolshevic sympathizers and admirers. Let us hope that this beast’s lawyer will not be inspired to defend this hideous crime by placing it on a political basis, for otherwise the head of his monstrous client will most probably drop into the Hall of Fame instead of into the basket of the guillotine. Proudhon, descendant of Hebert and Clootz, and grandfather of Bolshevism, who declared that “God is folly and cowardice; God is evil,” and his worthy disciple, Bakunin, whose celebrated toast was: “To the destruction of all law and order, and the unchain- ing of evil passions,” are unquestionably tickled to death with this crime, the minutest details of which they have surely received by radio in Hades, where they are now, with all their gang, probably bumping bumpers over it with Lucifer. The smartest lady I ever met told me not long ago, at the smartest dinner I ever attended, that she “simply adored Proudhon,” whom she considered “a perfectly 24 By Way of Introduction marvellous genius and the most progressive spirit of the nineteenth century.” An hour later, with her dernier cri skirts above her knees, she was progressively shimmy-shaking in a casino with her slick and sleek professional dancing partner, while her sex-equality, democratic husband was slowly but surely progressing out of sight under the table. As a single day’s issue of a great “Daily” involves the destruction of a thousand trees, I shall leave it to you, fair reader, to calculate how many have been recently razed to the ground to provide the world with the most intimate and sensational details of America’s latest and smartest divorce scandal. And now that every town, village, and mining camp has its “Smart Set,” the forestry department had better turn its atten- tion to the ever-increasing “Society News” and ‘Social Items” which are causing more havoc in our forests than fires. I once calculated that it cost at least one hundred and fifty thousand trees to instruct the masses in the life of Harry Thaw. One day last spring I fell asleep under a spreading oak, in the cool shade of a luxuriant grove, when sud- denly I was awakened, not by the full-throated song of a thrush, but by the diabolical shriek of a sawing machine. As it was at the time of Fatty Arbuckle’s trial, it occurred to me that probably in a few days all this fairyland of light, shadow, leaf, and branch would be transmuted into millions of newspaper pages describ- ing and illustrating every incident of Fatty’s career from the time of his birth. What a tremor of apprehension must have passed through the beautiful trees of France when the first 25 Mumbo Jumbo page photograph of Desiré Landru appeared in the French Press surrounded by ten of the wives whom he had butchered. And think how every forest must wail with alarm at the approach of Messrs. Hearst, Pulitzer, and Viscount Rothermere. I have often questioned what will happen when there is no longer a sufficient amount of timber to furnish newspaper pulp for the ever-increasing number of world-famous geniuses. I suppose the laws of nat- ural adjustment will then take care of such a dramatic situation, for when everyone becomes celebrated (which is not far off), those who are the most celebrated will undoubtedly endeavour to become nonentities in order to distinguish themselves from the rest, and “The Hall of Fame” will be superseded by “The Hall of Obscurity,” wherein the “Friends of Music” will be called upon to organize choral societies to chant: “How stupid to be somebody! How public, like a frog, To croak your name the livelong day, To an admiring mob.” For those who prefer forests to newspapers, it must be extremely distressing to see their beloved trees rap- idly disappearing into machine pulp to be transmuted into untold millions of tons of chronicled lies, gossip, scandal, criminality, pole-cat politics, self-exploitation, charlatanism, baseball, sport, social items, nostrums, and artful advertisements,” for the general enlighten- 1“The freedom of the press may be regarded as a permission to sell poison—poison for the heart and the mind. There is no idea so foolish, but that it cannot be put into the heads of the ignorant and incapable multitude.”—ScHopeNHAUER. 26 By Way of Introduction ment and education of the masses, who seem to absorb with amazing facility such carefully prepared instruc- tion and uplift, calculated to warm the cockles of their hearts with sensations of progress, civilization, and superiority. I am convinced that Luis de Gongora himself could not have equalled Miss Neysa McMein’s dainty rhap- sody over Carpentier (the most newspapered and mag- azined “he-man” of the twentieth century, except per- haps Charlie Chaplin, Maréchal Foch, and Desiré Lan- dru),’ when “that beautiful person” appeared before her in a “wonder white bathroby thing with curious Javanese figures. Angelo would have fainted with joy at the beauty of his profile. . . . His imaginative sensi- tive hands, with beautiful oval nails . . . might have 1 The following are extracts from columns which appeared in the press, a year after Landru’s execution: “Paris is to own Landru’s stove. The notorious cookery stove in which Landru roasted his numerous wives, was sold by auction to-day for 4,200 . francs, after brisk bidding. Candidates even wrote from the Netherlands offering large sums, and for the hour during which the stove was on view, it was photographed from every possible ‘point of view by countless operators with cameras. All objects directly recalling the crimes committed at the lone house at Gambais were in great demand. These included locks of hair belonging to the unfortunate women whom Landru despoiled and murdered, articles of female attire, combs, etc. Landru’s seal with his initials fetched 400 francs. The stove was put up at 500 francs; bidders ran up the figures rapidly to 4,000 francs. On the other hand, the shabby little purse which he had in his pocket when arrested made only 35 francs, which seems cheap for so personal a souvenir of a historic character.” It is doubtful, in this chaos of decadence, if the stove which warmed our glorious Marshal Foch who led ten million troops to victory, will ever reach such a figure. Two weeks later: “Landru’s kitchen stove has been resold to an Italian collector in Turin for 30,000 francs.” O tempora! O mores! 27 Mumbo Jumbo belonged to anyone from Napoleon to Whistler! And his legs!!” etc., etc. This is but a feather of ecstasy from tons and tons of similar panegyrics. But let us not overlook our pacifist, socialist, and ostrich-like sentimentalist, Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, after comparing Carpentier to Charles the Twelfth, dramatically exclaims at the ring- side, from the vantage of a ten-pound seat: “Genius could not be more unmistakable!’ Would Carpentier say as much of Shaw? I wonder! I believe the author who etherialized psychothenic maudlinism in Pelleas and Mélisande even out-pointed Shaw in Carpentierism. Undoubtedly Cachin’s acolyte, Anatole France, would have surpassed the above transvaluists in super- lative appreciation of his prize-ring compatriot, had he not been absorbed in worship before the shrine of Bolshevism, where he was heard to exclaim, with the Nobel Prize in his pocket: “I adore Lenin, because he works for the good of humanity.” And this from Anatole, who, with jewelled pen, and surrounded by priceless works of art, consecrates in the perfumed precincts of the Avenue du Bois his life to proving that humanity is not worth working for. I fail, however, to understand why so many of our modern altruistic Progressives, who have apparently advanced beyond normalcy, should prefer the “All Lowest” to the “All Highest,” not only in religion and statecraft, but in art and all other crafts as well.’ 1“T do hope the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be impossible,” declared Henry James, Sen., over sixty years ago. What would he have said to the benevolent reign of Bolshevism? 28 By Way of Introduction Personally, as I find that art, like honey, only attains perfection under religious and monarchical institu- tions, I, like the bees, fundamentally believe not only in the divine right of King and Queen, but in the divine right of Pope, Caliph, and artist too, which, after all, is purely and simply a normal biological belief in normal biological rights. As every normal man by nature and instinct is a monarchist, it stands to reason that the democratic doctrine has been foisted upon him by energetic, mesmeric, unscrupulous bell-wethers, who are immune from pity and ever ready to perpetrate the most contemptible trick in order to gratify their personal vanity, and obtain, through flattery and mob- sycophancy, control of the mass. It is as unnatural and uninstinctive to have a mob- elected President as it would be for a hive to have a president bee. Let us hope that the bees will not con- tract the malady of our epoch and substitute democ- racy for monarchy; for in such an event we may expect from them tabloids of adulterated saccharine instead of nectar from the flowers of the field. I can think of nothing more satanically monotonous and evilly dismal than a world without class distinc- tions and populated with communal processional human caterpillars, even were they all uniformly glossy, chic, smart and “spiffy”; for I consider that the prin- cipal purpose of civilization is to create not only class distinction, but solid class barriers, in order to give the humans inspiring and invigorating desires and possi- bilities of peeping and, when ability permits, of jump- ing from one enclosure into another. They are thereby supplied with emotions of romance, hope, exaltation, 29 Mumbo Jumbo mystery, picturesqueness, respect, awe, reverence, and all the other qualities and sensations based on social differences which are fundamentally essential to the happiness, amusement and mental health of humanity; and without which any society will in time degenerate into dullness, viciousness, brutality and chaos.’ The stylized, solicitous family butler, who, alas! is rapidly disappearing, is one of the few remaining sym- bols of civilization, and unless we are at least able to retain him, it will not be long before we will be waiting on ourselves in the jungle, for without him and his traditional mutton-chop whiskers or smooth-shaven face—an insignia of service of which every honest servant is proud—there can be no art or culture. I know of a charming Virginian family living in Nice who fully appreciate this fact; and I have met few who are doing more to uphold the traditions of true civilization than is their faithful, aged butler, Enrico. If French sociologists, political economists and min- isters of fine arts would only realize the enormous importance, even from a purely commercial point of view, of preserving the Dundreary whiskers of their obsequious (in the best sense of the word) maitres d@’hétel, they would devote more attention to their cul- ture and growth and less attention to the coif of such 1“The monarchical form of government is natural to man. Even the solar system is monarchical. A republic is as un- natural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. . . . There is always a numerous host of the stupid and the weak, and in a republican constitution it is easy for them to suppress and exclude the men of ability, so that they may not be outflanked by them. ... In a monarchy, talent and intelligence receive a natural advocacy and support from above.”—ScHOPENHAUER. 30 By Way of Introduction unprepossessing-looking “comrades” as Cachin, Lon- guet, Herriot and toute leur bande. Personally, I would infinitely prefer to wear flam- boyant Dundrearies and serve others than live in a community where all service was taboo. I would even sooner choose to be born in Uncle Tom’s cabin (In reality, Uncle Toms,* Aunt Elizas, Sambos, pickanin- nies and mammies were far happier in the aristocratic F.F.V. days of My Old Kentucky Home and Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party than in these days of Yow’re some Cutie and you’ve got me vamped) than live in a state where liberty, equality and fraternity were reali- ties and not pure illusions, as they are and always will be.” For with our present mental equipment, which for many thousands of years has certainly not improved, I can think of no greater moral and physical bondage than the Utopia conceived of by our modern Utopians. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that butletorial side-whiskers are of much greater impor- tance—for the moment, at any rate—to the safeguard- ing of European civilization than is the Luxembourg Museum, which is rapidly becoming proletculturized, or the august assembly of the Académie Francaise, where Demos has already begun to “‘butt in.” 1 When Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a New England senti- mentalist, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she had never been farther south than Cincinnati, and consequently, like most of the May- flowering Yankees of her day (and since her day as well), was entirely ignorant of the refined, chivalrous, generous, happy civ- ilization of the South. 2“The strengthening and elevation of the human race always involves the existence of slaves.” ——-NIETZSCHE. 31 Mumbo Jumbo Although the word democracy is the largest, ugliest and most grotesquely ornate receptacle of salivary vulgarity, mawkishness and hypocrisy in the diction- ary, there are comparatively few men of to-day who would not with a cringing gesture of mob-servility hold it to their lips and drink deep from it in order to quench their thirst for popularity with the mass, which democrats despise in proportion to their elevation above it. As the moral health, entertainment and hap- piness of the proletariat is entirely dependent upon the moral health and happiness of a limited aristocratic governing cast, it necessarily follows that the prole- tariat is at present far from being happy, since it finds itself led by riffraff arrivists, high priests of vulgarity, machine-power larrikins, smug, sentimental, pharisaic bourgeois, overfed idealists and scientific fanatics. Blustering proselytizing glorification of mediocrity is always significant of decadence, and consequently it is not surprising to find, in this age of “‘who’s who?”— when every Tom in business, and every Dick in politics, and every Harry in sport, art and philanthropy, has his busy-buzzy Boswell—that the life of Lewis Carroll, our modern La Fontaine, and one of the most distin- guished, whimsical and poetical philosophers of all time and of all languages, has been omitted from the Encyclopedia Britannica; * wherein his contemporaries, Messrs. Hill, Gould, “Boss” Croker, Carnegie, and Company, and innumerable other geniuses of shop, 1J have since discovered the life and light of the great poet Lewis Carroll (a pseudonym) hidden in the Encyclopedia Bri- tannica under the bushel of a mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 32 By Way of Introduction trade and opportunism, may be found basking under columns of immortal academic sunlight. No doubt the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in one of the most ancient seats of learning, considered that Carroll could immortalize himself, without their assistance. Think, O Charlie Chaplin, of the space that these immortal- izers have probably already set aside for you, Mrs. Castle, Carpentier and the “The World’s Sweetheart.” Little did it occur to Huysmans on presenting Mon- sieur des Esseintes, the most precious of exsthetes, to the Paris public that some day Dr. Marston T. Bogart, military beau and professor of organic chemistry at Columbia University, would be delivering lectures on ‘perfumed preludes and scented symphonies, composed from a ‘scale’ of odours”; and gallantly tossing to the lovely “‘New-Yorkaises” “perfumed musical bouquets based on ‘sol,’ sol, pergolair; sol, pois de senteur; re, violet; fa, tuberose; sol, orange flowers; si, surone.” No one but a scientist would have taken Monsieur des Esseintes with such olfactory earnestness! But apropos of laboratorial bouquets of scientific music, I know of another scientist who, by the injection of various fluids, finally succeeded in making a hen crow, which achievement was proclaimed by the Press as one of the greatest triumphs of the century, although I, for one, think it the kind of “dirty trick” which any mischievous child would enjoy playing on a dutiful, unsuspecting rooster. It is even possible that the transformation of the sexes may take place in America without the aid of science, judging from the elongation and flattening of the female form and the shortening of 30 Mumbo Jumbo the male leg and the abnormal development of his posterior. The following Bill which has been presented in the Senate in the state of Georgia is also symptomatic of sex transformation. “It is a Bill designed to prevent any man from slipping away from home without inform- ing his wife whither he is going and obtaining her consent.” And in Chicago a poor devil of a husband has been recently forbidden by the court from “‘visiting, seeing, talking to or riding with any woman except his wife.” From early childhood I have foreseen it—the American inverted harem. We may soon expect to see our Gibson men veiled and cloistered like the Turkish ladies. I only hope, when my final bed-time comes, that I shall not be seized by a band of ruthless fanati- cal brigands, who, by means of a monkey gland, or the fluid of a bottle-nosed chimera’s dorsal fin, or some other vicious scientific artifice concocted to turn me into a perfect young lady, will prevent me from accomplishing my sacred right of creeping back like a weary little child, after a hard day’s play, into the womb of Mother Earth—the transvaluing mother of all values. But we must not wander too far afield, especially in these days when literature, like food, has been com- pressed by science into magazine digests of tabloids, capsules and extracts. It is nevertheless a curious fact that science, while giving us every conceivable kind of time-saving device, is robbing us of all our time for the real worth-while enjoyments of life, which, as the Divine Autocrat has decreed, are not only purely unsci- entific, but also entirely undemocratic. This would 34 By Way of Introduction account, I imagine, for the fatuous, self-satisfied, aggressive and almost alarmingly vulgar expression of our democratized artists, philosophers and scientists,’ who, having lost their imagination, and consequently their capacity for true enjoyment, take infinite pains to complicate the simplest and most obvious facts of nature with highfalutin phrases and mathematical symbols. And this abracadabra they then serve up to their brother bourgeois, whose egotism is always tickled by gibberosity, grandsillyquence and scientific mystification, believing this jargon to be expressive of ‘““progress”—a word with which his tongue is thickly coated, and of which he considers himself a divinely appointed guardian. What bourgeois would not choose to have himself transported by aeroplane, or wafted by a varnished three-legged department-store Ouija board into a heavenly kingdom of what he calls spiritualistic science, rather than be borne like a little child, on wings of faith, imagination and mystical adoration of nature, into the realms of God, where science, sex-equality and democracy enter not—thank God! We have always suspected that the good, industrious, utilitarian burgher prefers with heart, sight and nose the glint of varnish and odour of petrol to sun-lit fields and aroma of flowers. I am even expecting soon to see gasoline cans labelled 1“The greatest discoverer,’ wrote Kant, “in the sphere of science differs only in degree from the ordinary man; the genius, on the other hand, differs specifically.” This would explain why the good bourgeois instinctively loves the scientist and mistrusts and even hates the genius, unless he is able to exploit him either socially or monetarily. 35 Mumbo Jumbo “Forbidden Fruit,” ‘“Love’s Awakening,” ‘Circe,’ ‘Scientific Kisses,” “Strange Flower,” etc., and to be driven by cultured chauffeurs with monogramed hand- kerchiefs of the sheerest linen, reeking with the perfume of their favourite petroleum. It is a lucky thing that the Kaiser did not realize to what extent socially apprehensive America had be- come obsessed and dazed with the complexities and obfuscating subtleties of social etiquette, otherwise he might have checked the victorious charge of the Amer- ican troops at Chateau Thierry—who were fighting to make the world safe for democracy—by hurling at them through magnaphones such perplexing and embar- rassing questions as: “Is it correct to eat asparagus with your fingers?” ‘Should the napkin be entirely unfolded or should the centre crease be allowed to remain?” ‘Who enters the tramcar first, the gentle- man or the lady?” ‘How may an elegant confident poise be developed in cultured society?” ‘Should a femme du monde peel a banana in public?” How thrilled must be the urbanites and commuters to hear that they will soon be able to “listen in” by means of a handy aluminium stentorphone with germ- proof receiver and mouthpiece, and hear the very latest news and gossip about those who have “‘passed over.” Ever since Sir Oliver Lodge was asked by his departed son Raymond for a Ford car and a large cigar, the progressive bourgeois has been pursuing occult scien- _tists with entreaties to provide him with a device through which he might receive similar ethereal mes- sages; for only a celestial scientist like Sir Oliver 36 By Way of Introduction could be expected to communicate with spirits without the help of a patented machine. In spite of Einstein to right of us, Einstein to left of us, Einstein in front of us, I, nevertheless, have suc- ceeded for the past months in keeping him out of my subconscious mind, for once bill-boarded, cinemato- graphed, phonographed, magazined and newspapered into it, I know from experience how extremely difficult it might be to get him out. A short time ago I was seriously disquieted by Jean Cocteau, Lady Astor, Dempsey, Mrs. Asquith, John Wanamaker the poet of dry goods, Mademoiselle Lenglen, Clare Sheridan and Otto Kahn, who had so successfully advertised their way into my poor brain that I almost despaired of being able to dislodge them. For over two weeks they haunted my dreams, and not only monopolized all conversation, but drove away my household gods. Of Bernard Shaw, and Heinz, the genius of “fifty-seven varieties,” I have never been able to rid myself, and as for Mrs. Stetson, and Mr. Carter of liver-pill fame, they have for years been dashing through my night- mares, mounted on “Bull Durham” and brandishing bottles of ‘“Campbell’s Tomato Soup,” which, as the world knows, is considered most delectable by Sir Thomas Lipton, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Countess of War- wick, Lord Northcliffe’s famous chauffeur, and a legion of other celebrities. Like the scholastics of the Middle Ages, who medi- tated over how many angels could be stood on the point of a needle, I now find myself speculating as to how many proletarians and Palace-Hotel democrats have been stood upside down on the point of Einstein’s 37 Mumbo Jumbo theory. It is only recently I discovered that Einstein is a scientist advertising “Relativity” which everyone seems to comprehend except myself. Even my old cook told me the other day that relativity was the basis of modern art, and that I was unquestionably taller in the salon than I was in her kitchen. This must be true, as it sounds so scientific. ‘EKinstein’s theory”! Here he is again, covering an entire page in the daily Press, and below the flaming letters of his name you are asked: “Can you talk about Einstein’s theory intelligently?” You are then informed that “The Encyclopedia Americana will put the knowledge of the world at your elbow.” What an appalling idea! especially for the few of us left who, realizing that we know absolutely nothing, take our divine ignorance with holy seriousness. Behold another full-page advertisement of ‘Einstein for Children.” We will probably soon have patented Einstein nipples, so that infants will be able to sub- jectively suck in his theory with scientifically prepared milk. As the last war was fought to make the world safe for Democracy, the world in the next war will probably be made safe for Relativity, free-verse and istism art. ‘The amazingly gifted E. E. Cummings— one of a countless drove of modern poetical geniuses— who Has lately honoured Broom with his exquisite esoteric “Three United States Sonnets,” would, with- out doubt, consider such a war unnecessary, for you will see in the following, one of the supreme three, that he fancies the world, or the U.S.A. at all events, already entirely safe for him. By jingo! it looks as if Broom has stolen a march 38 By Way of Introduction over The Nation, The Masses, The New Republic, The New Marx Snobian, The Ladies’ Home Bolshevist, and last, but very far from being least, The Police Gazette, which has a frank naturalness and genuine simplicity rarely to be found in the just-mentioned smart weeklies. I trust that it is still going on, although I have not seen it since the days when my old Irish nurse was a fervent subscriber to it. But hark to E. E. Cummings, the bard of Manhat- tan, and judge for yourself. Personally I find that he has ascended to greater heights in Super-Pullman- Palace * democracy than Sandburg, Cendras, Wyndam Lewis, de Bosschere, Joyce, or even the famous Bellock Stardale, who is now considered in Europe, by Rotun- dians and Ritzonians, to be far greater than either Shakespeare or Goethe. 1The Pullman-Palace Car, which permits the good democrat to travel not only “first-class” but “super-first-class” with a clear conscience, is one of the most ingenuous practices of democratic hypocrisy. A Labour leader and assiduous reader of The New Republic, The Masses and The Nation, once told me, while lounging in the upholstered armchair of a “Pullman-Palace Car,” that he “would rather die than live in a rotten, degenerate country where ‘first- class’ was tolerated.” Hitched on to the end of our train at the time was one of democracy’s innumerable private cars, in which were a “Hot- Stuff” lover of the plain people with his wife, who was a “Regular Guy” and “Jazz Queen,” their “Some Kid” of a Socialist daughter, clad in “knickers,” communistic maids and valets, and an aristo- cratic dog. I am all for “first-class” and private cars, but not for having “Hot-Stuffs,” “Regular Guys” and Communists in them! As I am not a democrat, I do not object to being with the public in public, but I do object to being with the public in private. 39 Mumbo Jumbo I might note in passing that, save in dress, Rotun- dians, Greenwich Villagers and Ritzonians are curiously alike in manners, habits, thoughts and ambitions. But —Hark!! III by god i want above fourteenth fifth’s deep purring biceps, the mystic screech of Broadway, the trivial stink of rich frail firm asinine life (i pant for what’s below. the singer. Wall. 1 want the perpendicular lips the insane teeth the vertical grin give me the Square in spring. the little barbarous Greenwich perfumed fake And most, the futile fooling labyrinth where noisy colours stroll . . . and the Baboon sniggering insipidities while. i sit, sipping singular anisettes as. One opaque big girl jiggles thickly hips to the canoun but Hassan chuckles seeing the Greeks breathe) No one but an ultra-select Palace-Hotel democrat, ‘*jazz-lizard,” sex-equalitarian, mob-idolater and pro- gressive machine idealist could possibly have had such an inspiration. “This sort of thing knocks literature into a cocked hat,” writes John Dos Passos in his panegyric on the Olympian genius of E. E. Cummings. 40 By Way of Introduction In a future number of The Dial we will surely see E. E. crowning John! The following lines are more Parnassian laurel leaves gathered by John for the immortal wreath of E. E. :— “It is writing created in the ear and lips and jotted down. For accuracy in noting the halting cadences of talk and making music of it, I don’t know anything that comes up to these two passages.” Anyone with a sensitive ear will immediately detect in “these two passages” the lyrical acroamatical harmonies of E. E. “Buffalo Bill’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death.” One wonders how they do it! I see that Sandburg has gone and done it again all over pages and pages of that most fastidious, mundane and highly respectable New Republic, with, as he puts it, “the independence of a hog on ice.” The ever-increasing bevies of genius- ettes, composed of Gertrude Steins* and Marianne Moores, have no compunction whatsoever about doing 1 Mrs. Stein, who has recently been overdone by Jo Davidson, underdone by Jacques Lipschitz, and done to death by Pablo Picasso has almost been outdone by Sherwood Anderson in the following Little Review of her super-genius: “She gives words an oddly new, intimate flavour, and at the same time makes 41 Mumbo Jumbo it in public too. I know not what effect their divine affatus will eventually have upon them, but I am be- ginning to suspect what it was the Boojum read to the poor Snark-hunting Baker that caused him to “softly and suddenly vanish away.” But why meander on?—for has not the unbelief, hysterical self-exploitation, neurotic self-consciousness, pretentiousness, vulgarity, brutality, inane vanity, lack of respect, loss of dignity and tradition, and falsifica- tion of all human values of our epoch, been expressed unwittingly but in the most inimitable fashion by our Barnumized Mr. Shaw in his bill-boarded appreciation of Shakespeare, which, by the way, I find amazingly illustrative of La Fontaine’s fable of The Rat and the Elephant? 'This fable I always thought rather ex- travagant, until I came across the following lines by England’s self-exploiting self-exporter, but now I feel that La Fontaine might have even substituted gnat for rat. ‘With the single exception of Homer,” de- clares Fabian George, “there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so utterly familiar words seem almost like strangers. ... For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words.” Oh! Sherwood, Sherwood! How could you? The following is an extract from “A Portrait of Jo Davidson,” executed by Mrs. Stein in her “city of words”: “To be back, to attack back. Attack back. To be back to be back to attack back... . You know and I know, I know and you know, you know and I know, we know and they know, they know and we know, they know and I know, they know and they know you know and you know I know and I know,” I certainly do know Gertrude, and I furthermore know that you know, but it’s hard on the poor gullible chap who doesn’t know. Sherwood, Jacques, Jo, and Pablo all know, too, I’m sure. 42 By Way of Introduction as I despise Shakespeare—when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch that it would posi- tively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.” Of course La Fontaine’s rat was no fool, for by associating his name with the elephant he has managed to keep himself in the public eye for two centuries. The public eye, to be sure, particularly at present, is not the most desirable place to find oneself in, for every possible species of rodentia has, of recent years, succeeded in gnawing its way into it. Who knows! perhaps it may be my destiny to be pushed some day into this public eye of fame by friend and foe and left there to suffocate in the limelight, among a howling mob of celebrities. A short time ago a musical “genius” was pointed out to me who had just popped into fame for having declared that Wagner was merely opéra bouffe. And I know of another celebrity who, from fear of sink- ing into oblivion, suddenly began to squirt “‘arty” de- preciation over Leonardo da Vinci. I am fully aware, however, of having done a consid- erable amount of squirting myself, but only on those who would prefer to be squirted on, rather than be left unnoticed. But while we are on the subject of rats, gnats and elephants, listen to America’s “New Order of Critical Values” by ten of her most “celebrated authorities,” who, “with a view of covering the whole field of life and thought,” have compiled in the April Patrician the following chart according to their “scheme of 43 Mumbo Jumbo things.” The names are marked on a scale ranging between plus 25 and minus 25. The ten highest are: Shakespeare and Bach, each 22; Goethe, Anatole France, Beethoven and Nietzsche, 19; Wagner, 18; Leonardo da Vinci and Charlie Chaplin, 17; Flaubert, Aristotle, Plato, George Washington, Voltaire, 16; Walt Whitman, 15. These patrician authorities, there- fore, allot ninth place among the greatest geniuses in the world’s history to Charlie Chaplin. Our village socialist and uplifter, who has introduced the cinema and dancing “salon” to our peaceful fishing folk, would probably give Charlie, who is, according to Mr. Waldo Frank, not only “our most authentic dramatic figure,” but “our sweetest playboy,” first place, particularly after having seen him last night, in a film, put his muddy boots on a lady’s lap and then get idiotically and combatively drunk for the educational amusement and edification of our village children. In the middle of the performance a peasant arose with great dignity and left the hall, with his wife and grandchildren, for, being illiterate and of the old school, he was unable to admire in Charlie Chaplin what Jean Cocteau would call the realism of Shakespeare and Moliére. In the same article Cocteau, with true Dadaist cour: age, asks: “Shall I dare” (and of course he does; they all do) “to add that it is the realism of the great, of the tender Charlie Chaplin?” “I hope,” continues poetasting Jean, “that this phrase may reach him and bring him the homage of our whole generation.” Shall I now dare to add still more realism to the tender realism of our Yankee-doodlized, twinkling French bardlet? 44, By Way of Introduction “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, I know full well what you’re at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle”’— But to continue with our modern Patrician authori- ties : Among the two hundred and two names chosen from Plato to the present day are Babe Ruth, Mary Pick- ford, Carpentier, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Herbert Croly, Mademoiselle Lenglen, Francis Hackett, Elsie Ferguson, Billy Sunday, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Clare Sheridan, Dempsey, Elinor Glyn, Al Jolson, H. L. Mencken, and others of like genius. Probably Dr. G. V. Lapogue, a world-famous scien- tist, had the above American Olympians in mind when he opened his address before the Eugenics Congress in New York with the following prophetic exhortation :— “America, I declare solemnly that it depends on you to save civilization and produce a race of demi-gods.” Let us hope, on the contrary, that civilization, or what there is left of it, will dissuade America from under- taking any such enterprise. I only fear that Dr. Lapogue and his scientific associates of the Eugenics Congress, who expect, no doubt, to produce by scien- tific methods this race of demi-gods in factories and laboratories, have become far too solemn to be saved, or otherwise I would suggest having them all stretched out, on a star-lit night, with their faces upturned to the heavens, in order to cure them for ever of taking themselves too solemnly. 45 Mumbo Jumbo In fact, as the vast majority of human ills arise from taking ourselves too solemnly, I can think of no better cure for scientific megalomaniacs, and for the ever- increasing number of fatuous burghers and fatted pro- letarians who are secretly pining and plotting to be- come supermen, than a few minutes of star-gazing every night before bed-time. It is, of course, natural that such a simple, inexpensive cure would not meet with the approval of bone-setters, and those who are de- riving flourishing incomes from nostrums and thermal resorts. Affluent neurologists and psychiatrists would obviously consider such an idea puerile and entirely absurd. I continue, nevertheless, to take this cure every star-lit night, in spite of the fact that the stars have the most drastic effect on Dr. William Carlos Williams, who, we are told by Alfred Kreymborg, is one of the greatest of modern poets, and “deserves a garland, with which he would hang you.” It is hardly necessary to add that the Doctor dedicated the follow- ing scientific effusion to Alfred, his faithful Boswell :— THE COLD NIGHT It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars— like the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife—among her five children. . If I could only be present at a meeting, intra parietes, between Dr. G. V. Lapogue, Dr. William Carlos Wil- liams, Dr. Oliver Lodge and Dr. Marston T. Bogart! Ah! but that is too much to expect! 46 By Way of Introduction Had Dr. William Carlos Williams whispered in a fit of fine scientific frenzy, on a hot night, in the ear of the Police Sergeant’s wife that her bare thighs reminded him of the white moon among her scattered stars, it would have been his private business, but when the Doctor goes on to tell us, on a cold night, in cold print and in cold calculation, that he has received a “new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April... In April I shall see again—In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergeant’s wife perfect still after many babies. Oya!” —it then becomes not only our business, but even, methinks, the business of the police. If we expect the police to protect our wives against thugs and Bolshe- vists, it behoves us, I consider, to protect their wives against lusty imagists like Dr. Williams. But to give you some idea of the place occupied by the Doctor in American letters, I shall quote the fol- lowing appreciations of another one of his esoteric volumes entitled Kora in Hell :—‘‘Surely a unique book! These phrases stand on their feet or sit on their bot- toms well outside the family circle,” says The Dial. And again: “The most original book of the year,” writes The Boston Transcript. I sincerely trust that the devil, the Doctor and the Transcript will manage to keep “Kora in Hell,” and that T'he Dial will continue to see that all those phrases remain seated on their bottoms well outside my family circle. But we must AT Mumbo Jumbo not overlook William Marion Reedy, the Bellman of the Crew of imagists, who continues to tingle his bell in praise of the Doctor: “A hard, straight, bitter jave- lin . . . but there is a tang of very old sherry in hin, to mellow the irony. As you read him you begin to realize how little poetry—or prose—depends on defini- tions, or precedents, or forms.” Bravo William Marion Reedy! “So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply ‘They are merely conventional signs!’ ” I don’t know about the old sherry, but there is cer- tainly more than a tang of something very, very old indeed in the Doctor and his admirers. The Doctor would have us fully appreciate this fact, as he devotes an entire page of eight by five inches to a poem entitled “Spring,” comprising in all the two following lines :— *“O my grey hairs! You are truly white as plum blossoms.” On page 51 in the same volume we find another poem called “Lines,” of which there are exactly eight words on an otherwise empty page: ‘Leaves are greygreen, the glass broken, bright green.” You see we are not so far away, after all, from “ ‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes, But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’ 48 By Way of Introduction (So the crew would protest) “that’s he’s brought us the best, A perfect and absolute blank.’ ” It is not that I object to an empty page, nor an empty brain, but I do object to an empty heart. In fact, one of the greatest tragedies to me in life is that when the heart is surcharged with pure emotion both page and brain are apt to remain a blank. I do not believe this, however, to be the case of the Doctor, who is very careful to tell us that he conceals his heart in his “male belly.”’* I do believe it, though, in the case of the poor, ignorant, inarticulate chap who, after gazing in silence for over an hour at the full moon, while tenderly holding the hand of his beloved “Maggy,” suddenly blurted out: “It looks like hell, don’t it?” He, at least, “struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God,” a chord which is never struck by those with empty hearts, even if their brains, pages and pockets are full. This has, indeed, been a long deviation, and much too long had it merely been a question of dragging in a pair of doctors; but as Dr. William Carlos Williams and Dr. G. V. Lapogue are, like E. E. Cummings, Anatoly Maryngoff, Carl Sandburg and the others, such characteristic cases of “Walt Whitmania,” I do not feel that I have allotted them too much space. This whitmania has now spread to the farthest cor- *In columns of attack against the author, the English Outlook refers to our Doctor as “that very individual living poet.” It would seem that the Outlook has concealed not only its heart but its intelligence as well in the same hiding place as the Doctor. Heavens, what an outlook! 49 Mumbo Jumbo ners of the earth, and is not only making ravages in cities, suburbs and small towns, but even the rural class has become infected with it. My farmer’s wife asked me recently if I would not pass judgment on a book of verse written by her son. ‘““He feels that he owes it to the public to have it pub- lished,” she said. As her son, a young man about twenty-five, in my employ, has already passed judg- ment on me for over a year by receiving exorbitant wages for doing practically nothing but write his book, I did not feel it incumbent upon me to sponsor its pub- lication, although I find it quite on a par with those of our most advertised modern bards or “word fellows,” as Mr. Sherwood Anderson affectionately calls them with Ohioan debonarity. But I shall let you judge for yourself : Carrots cesar crossed the alpes on the top of a buss with his hand on his belly remember xenophon and think of his belly and the glorious belly of h. g. wells and lenin’s belly and trotsky’s belly think of the bellies of salambo and sapho I shall think of my own belly your belly his belly her belly I have been wounded with pointed kisses they are too long and pink I dare not eat them 0.g. (Norr.—You will observe that the only capitals in the poem are the three capital I’s.) 50 By Way of Introduction As our village, like yours, is naturally not without its uplifter and detective of genius, it will surely not be long before our farmer’s lad will be enrolled as an immortal; and then The Dial will be given another opportunity to tell its readers with what majesty “these phrases sit on their bottoms.” The Little Review will undoubtedly discover them to be “The most important book which has come from the imagists”’; and Poetry will again find its precious self strolling, as it did while reviewing one of Dr. Williams’ works, in ‘a small garden induced to grow in unlikely surround- ings: on the whole so deep-rooted that its bloom should last a long time, so native that very likely meaner poets will come to pick what they can.” God forbid! for, with my family of farmer poets, I get practically noth- ing off my farm as it is. And now, most patient reader, I most humbly beg your forgiveness for having led you through highways and byways from “America’s new order of critical values” to my little farm in La Napoule. Let us re- turn to those “critical values.” Those who tied are: Martin Luther and Floyd Dell; Flo Ziegfeld and Frederick the Great; Lord Tennyson and Marilynn Miller. Other ratings are: Yvette Guil- bert, 11; Dante, 10; Mary Garden, 8; Joan of Arc, 3; Marie Jeritza, 7; George Eliot, 2; Dempsey, 6; Marshal Foch, 1; H. L. Mencken, 8; Wordsworth, 1; Ring Lardner, 7; Tennyson, 2; Ed. Wynn, 6; Rostand, 1. It is to be noted that the smart Mr. H. L. Mencken, co-editor of The Smart Set, votes five for himself, and gives zero to the following names :—Leonardo, Abélard, Marcus Aurelius, St. Francis, Racine, Shelley, Sopho- 51 Mumbo Jumbo cles, Foch, Raphael, Praxiteles. For Ludendorf he votes 23.7 As the ten august compilers of the above chart are the most conspicuous critics and editors of our most conspicuous newspapers and magazines, it allows one to realize to what altitudes the mass is being elevated! I shall now tack on my little evaluation of their transvaluations, which I find are pathetically silly, per- versely cynical, hysterically pretentious, priggishly grotesque, morbidly self-conscious, effetely insincere, clownishly self-exploiting, decadently flippant, neu- rotically vulgar, pathologically egotistical, invertedly snobbish, foppishly amoral, maliciously ungenerous, phantastically cheap, anemically insolent, mongrelly envious, and—commercially shrewd. It will probably be my lot to be accused of endeavour- ing to associate my name with “immortals,” but I feel that I have at least shown unusual modesty and dis- crimination in my selections. At all events I have 1 This is not surprising, as he tells us, in a painfully undigested article which has recently been reviewed in The Literary Digest, that the strutting popinjay Frenchman is completely devoid of gallantry, and is a wholly incompetent soldier, panicky in defeat and hysterical in victory. And yet—you may not believe it—I feel certain that some day we will hear of our immortal H. L. strutting about in Paris and sporting the “red thread of honour” in his buttonhole, for having done the popular Washington- Lafayette “sleight of tongue” trick. Herr Mencken, however, becomes a trifle super-smart when in the same gastroxynsisian article he assures us that “it is hard to find a civilized American who is not full of secret regret that the Kaiser did not conquer the country—and secret hopes that the Japs will do it before he has to go to Hell!” It looks to me as if our “high priest of Uncle Sam’s young intellectuals” has already gone there. Requiescat in pace! 52 By Way of Introduction displayed more self-control than the sentimental Mr. Shaw, who, with a modern dirt-cheap spade of factory- made wit, would like to dig up Shakespeare and throw stones at him. This is, however, the kind of violence to be expected from a passivist, socialist and rampant sentimentalist. How differently, and with what amazing skill and grandiose tolerance, did Shakespeare dig up Shaws and Jack Cades, to dangle them with Elizabethan mirth and philosophical irony before the footlights of humanity. In the happiest and most normal epochs the roots and leaves of humanity toiled with contentment, and found fulfilment in seeing their efforts crowned by mystical flowers of art, abstract science, religion, aris- tocracy and chivalry; but for the last century the lower middle class and proletariat, poisoned and auto-intoxi- cated by false and undigested education, forced on them by self-exploiting culture-boosters, vainglorious ego- centric philanthropists, and professionally buoyant, soul-sucking uplifters, have been oozing their way, with socialistic egotism, malice and envy, out of leaf and root into the bloom, until they are now producing odourless, colourless, artificial flowers, standardized by commercial science, and laid out by sex-equality in in- terminable, monotonous, dismal rows. The canker of decadence is already at the heart of this sorry, uniform, Taylorized flower of our commer- cially scientific, levelling, power-machine civilization; just as it attacked in previous times the heart of the mystical rose when it had lost its force and power to exhale the aroma of beauty, culture, romance and imagi- nation demanded of it by root and leaf. 53 Mumbo Jumbo But the Great Gardener of infinite variety and in- finite inequality, who takes no note of man’s notion of good and evil, of justice and injustice, will come again with another springtime, to drive forth, as He did from Paradise, the enemy of life force—the only enemy He recognizes—the Scientific Satan of equality and iden- ticalism. And the old plants withered by bluff, pretentiousness, and comfort science, Christian Science, social and sex- equality science, and science of tears, laughter, art and commerce; and rotten to the root with vulgarity and democratic factory soot of fraud, imitation, similarity and seriality, will be uprooted, and in their place will spring up anew the fragrant, mystical, unscientific flower of the past in “Gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.” And where the factory was, another Kubla Khan will another ‘stately pleasure dome decree.” And the democratic honk of the wild goose Ford, who declares that “history is all bunk,” will be hushed for centuries; and the voice of that sweet singer Israfel will again be heard in the land. Before my glass house (which, alas! is not even of plate-glass) is stoned by other dwellers under glass, I would like to suggest a “‘perfectly beautiful” unscien- tific plan; for it is tragically humorous to think that all the schemes which have thus far been devised for the salvaging of humanity have been conceived of by scien- tists who have consecrated their lives to the annihila- tion of it. This would not include, of course, those scientific gentlemen on the outside of the bull-ring, who 54 By Way of Introduction are always on hand to stuff up the poor old gored horse with medicated straw in order to send him back again into the arena of life. My plan is as follows. I propose that we immedi- ately begin to unmechanize, uninvent our way out of these scientific catacombs of unbelief, artificial pleasure, false happiness, machine idolatry and suffocating vul- garity into the sunlight of belief, full-hearted Eliza- bethan merriment, self-expression, vital refinement and true happiness which existed before the fatal moment when Watt, the super-democratic scientist, conceived of the diabolical thought of an automatic power- machine. We will start, therefore, by first suppressing radio, which has already had a most pernicious, degenerating, gossipy, scandal-mongering effect. (I ask you to ob- serve carefully the expressions of all those intimately connected with it.) The sinister submarine and unholy aeroplane will follow, with tittle-tattling telephone, de- moralizing, sub-ducating cinema, falsifying, cheapening phonograph, and all the other equalizing, vulgarizing, brutalizing contraptions. We will thus continue for, say a period of twenty-five years, until every form of power-machinery and every- thing connected with it, and dependent upon it, is ban- ished for all time from the world. In other words, I propose by a process of elimination to cure humanity in twenty-five years of the toxin inoculated into it one hundred and fifty years ago by Watt with his satanic invention, which has not only enslaved the human race, but corrupted and poisoned it to its very roots with the black pest of factory, 55 Mumbo Jumbo vulgarity * and Democracy, the three most infectious and deadly sins which have ever been conceived of by the scientific Prince of Darkness and equality against the God of Light, inequality and infinite variety. I would not have you think, patient reader, that this “perfectly beautiful” suggestion is made in a prosely- tizing spirit. Messianic exaltation was one of the many luxuries which disappeared with the last blush of my extreme youth. There is all the difference in the world between the reformer and him who would save his own skin. Star- gazing, to be sure, has led me to recognize that mine has merely an infinitesimal value, but the Almighty has, nevertheless, in His love of infinite variety, given me, and all the other microcosms, possibilities of pro- tecting our little selves by instilling into us the instinct of self-preservation. My above plan arises entirely from this instinct. It is not a question, therefore, of proselytizing ora- tory behind a desk on which is a glass of water for the parched lips of the would-be inspired uplifter, but rather the situation of one who finds himself confined in a malodorous room, with windows closed and blinds drawn. It becomes instinctive, for those who are forced to gasp for breath in such an atmosphere, to try, at least, to lift the blinds, open the windows, and let in air and sunshine, not for the purpose of converting or 1 We have included vulgarity with factory and Democracy, as vulgarity is essentially in all of its manifestations a levelling force, and consequently a sin against life. But unfortunately he who is not a votary of it is to-day considered a pariah and ostracized from every society. 56 By Way of Introduction uplifting others, but purely and simply out of a sense of self-preservation. The shoal man, on the contrary, gasps for breath when he finds himself in sunlight and fresh air, for, un- like the flying-fish or the ceratodus—a rare genus of fish having lungs—he has been limited to gills which allow him to breathe freely only while swimming under the scum of bluff, bunkum and hypocrisy. If, however, he is not occasionally given light and air, he soon begins to secrete deadly poisons, which develop into contagious diseases, and finally break out into pests. The recent war gave some idea to what extent man has become degenerated by science and machinery. Europe sank to a greater depth of inhumanity and viciousness than ever before, simply because she had become more highly mechanized. Had the war con- tinued, however, Europe would have been surpassed in scientific horror by America, which is the most mech- anized, unspiritual country in the world, and conse- quently the most dangerous to true civilization.* I feel sure that unless we soon succeed in suppress- ing the blackest of all pests, the power-machine, and cleansing the atmosphere of its poisonous gases of democracy, it will not be long before humanity will be ground into inhumanity, and instead of having one rampagious old lady waving the red rag of Bolshevism and screaming out, “This is red and so am I!” as 1“Steel and iron are of infinitely greater account in this commonwealth than flesh and blood.”—Dicxens. In all common- wealths, I think. The American Radiator Co., who advertises that “the Ideal Type A Boiler is more than human,” would most assuredly agree with Mr. Dickens. 57 Mumbo Jumbo Isadora Duncan recently did before a Boston audience, all of our old ladies will be doing it. Even if this fate does not overtake my generation, the thought of my children or their children being over- taken by it comes as a ghastly nightmare. Beelzebub, enthroned on his steam-roller of machine science and communism, is at our garden gate, with his ever-increasing hordes of disciples and dupes: necromancing mattoids, “‘arty” jukes, scientific hooli- gans, literary morons, mechanized submen, egocentric reformers, serialized snorting democrats, gold brick swamis, willy-nilly silly Fabians and Shavians, I.W.W. defectives, militant vulgarians, news-delirians, press- phobians, gutter and parlour socialists, apostate mud- dlemental Engelists, Tolstoyists, Russellists and Kropotkinists; beetle-browed mephitic syndicalists, Semitic Marxists, megalomaniacal internationalists, half-fool collectivists, paranoiac Bolshevists, manic- depressive Babouvists, Proudhonists, Bakuninists; processional caterpillar Saint-Simonists and Owenists, prohibitionists, mongrel environmentalists, baboon evolutionists, fetishized mechanomentalists, snide Cubists, sterile feeble-minded expressionists, buffoon Dadaists, monkey-hearted futurists, morosophists, commercial suggestionists, mass-educationalists, pro- fessional altruists, proletculturists, caponized lady-kin feminists, female cocka-lorumists, octopus monopolists, hoopoe psycho-analysts, fanatical idealists, fee-foxing psychiatrists, venal spiritualists, belching optimists and self-boosting philanthropists. The hour is at hand. . . . Let us rise out of this miasma of machinery and democracy and drive him 58 By Way of Introduction and his followers back into the black factory hell of equality and identicalism with a cross made in a joyful, aristocratic, free artisan age of the past, when art was an expression of faith. Nunc aut nunquam! * Although Doctor Emile Coué advertises in The New Republic and elsewhere that he has healed Lord Curzon and cured Countess Beatty, and that all America is beginning to repeat, “Day by day and in every way I am getting better and better,” I cannot help but feel that America, Europe, Lord Curzon, Lady Beatty, The New Republic and all of us are getting worse and worse. It even occurs to me on re-reading the above list that the world, with the possible exception of Henry Arthur Jones, Léon Daudet, Urbian Gohier, Miss M. G. Kil- breth, Mussolini and a few others—aincluding myself, of course—has already gone to the Devil. In these circumstances it is reassuring to know that civilization has always been wrecked or saved by a few. I, however, unlike Mr. Bellamy and all the other Utopian-dopians, am not for suppressing the Devil altogether, even were it possible; for a world without him would be a very smug, dull, inhuman place indeed, but a Utopian’ world without inequality and infinite variety would be inconceivably worse. 1 Avanti Savoia! Avanti Mussolini! Avanti Fascisti! Come to our rescue! Bring us the light and might of your moral Risorgi- mento! Save us, St George! and thrust again your spear into the maw of the dragon, who to-day has reappeared from his slimy swamp, more horrible than ever, under the deadly scientific camouflage of the altruistic Judas-smiling Labour Leader. Eja, eja, eja Alala!! 2“If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this: the only solution of the problem would be a despotism of the wise 59 Mumbo Jumbo To be capable of love, one must be capable of hate. To be capable of good, one must be at least capable of sin. To be able to love God and all of His works, one must be able to hate the Devil and most of his works. But to be able to hate the Devil, we must have him with us, if for no other reason than to keep us in good moral fighting trim, and prevent us from becoming utopianized, puritanical scribes and pharisees, with ready stones in our hands for Mary Magdalens and Prodigal Sons. What is so revolting about the unleashed passions of to-day is, that they arise, not from sincere hatred, but from the vicious suggestion of political serpents, senti- mentalists and cold-blooded mercenary scriveners, who are as incapable of true emotion as are our Mumbo- jumbo scientists, artists and their auto-intoxicated following. But we must not be too severe, for, in the circum- stances, it is a great wonder that humanity is not far worse than it is, considering that we are all suffering from the accumulated toxins of one hundred and fifty years of applied science and machinery. As I am considered by my progressive friends to be a reactionary mischief-maker, I can think of no more and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method of generation—that is, by the marriage of the noblest men with the cleverest and most in- tellectual women.”—ScHOPEN HAUER. This would be indeed the only solution, but fortunately in- tellectual women have a peculiar weakness for wastrels and Lotharios, and an instinctive antagonism for noble-minded men, while the noblest men have rarely been attracted by intellectual women. I said fortunately, for I do not think that a human utopia was ever a part of the Divine programme. 60 By Way of Introduction appropriate way to cap the climax of this introductory ramble—or gambol on the green, as modern democratic burghers on the asphalt will probably dub it—and not disappoint them in their appreciation of me, than with the prayer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the greatest of all mischief-makers. I have already referred to him as having headed the Encyclopedists, which is not altogether exact, as he, Voltaire and others were but contributors to the monu- mental work of Diderot and D’Alembert; but it was Rousseau who laid the corner-stone of the French Revolution. No man, however, would have been more disgusted and horrified by the results of his own teach- ings than Rousseau himself, for he was at least a human, warm-blooded maestro of mischief, unlike the cold- blooded, inhuman, mechanized illiterati of to-day. Of this much I am certain, that had Jean Jacques been living now, he would have been far more anti- republican than he ever was anti-monarchist, and in his famous denunciation of science would have included unholy democracy, which is the inevitable result of the automatic power-machine. “Almighty God, deliver us from the sciences and the pernicious arts of our fathers! Grant us ignorance, innocence and poverty once more as the only things which can bring happiness and which are of value in Thine eyes.” La Napouteg, 1922. AupEs-MarITIMES. 61 Mumbo Jumbo Characters In order of their Appearance Joun Brown et known as Mervyn, the world-famous painter. Mrs. Brown } . His mother. American Jew, of Kougelman & Company, world-famous art dealers of New York, Paris and London. Knight of the Legion of Honour. Isaac KouvuGeLtMAn American Jew, known as “J. R.’’; Nose EUR BERN OAR partner of Kougelman & Com- pany. Knight of the Legion of Honour. . Eten FLannican Old family servant to Mrs. Brown. A fifteenth-century Renaissance statue in wood, attributed by Van Rensselaer-Levineson to Della Quercia. American Jew; art booster for Kougelman & Company. Tue Hoty Virgin . Moses STEIN SAMUEL Van Rens- slums of New York, of Jewish SELAER-LEVINESON . parents. Commander of the Legion of Honour. Scion of old Knickerbocker fam- ily; celebrated art connoisseur and distinguished Ritzonian; liv- ing in Paris. Knight of the Legion of Honour. NorMAN DE PuystTer World-famous art critic and con- spicuous Ritzonian; born in the Van Loon 62 Characters World-famous society leader, in- | ternational patron of arts and sciences, celebrated littérateur, noted _ sociologist, | renowned beauty, conspicuous _ socialist, public !benefactor, world-famous organizer of art exhibitions and charity bazaars. Born in New York pawn-shop, of Jewish parents. Officer of the Legion of Honour. American multi-millionaire, world- Tue DUCHESS oF MANDELIEU famous financier, philanthropist and art collector. Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, etc., etc. Ezra P. Packer . His wife; also world-famous and “of assured social position.” Knight of the Legion of Honour. Mrs. Ezra P. Packer { Their daughter; world-famous Press and Magazine belle, cele- brated sculptress, President of “The Friends of Art,’ Vice- President of “The Friends of Music,’ etc. Socialist, and popular leader of the young smart intellectual set. Knight of the Legion of Honour. Miss Patricia PAcKER Private secretary to Ezra P. Packer; with expectations of ‘some day becoming world-famous. Oscar CapDMAN . Specialist in social celebrities, business, political and scientific geniuses and_ world - famous crooks. First NewspaPer Re- PORTER 63 Mumbo Jumbo Specialist in social celebrities, art, literary and musical geniuses and world-famous murderers. Srconp NeEwsPAPER REPORTER Specialist in social celebrities, stage and cinema royalty, sport geniuses and _ world--famous ' divorce scandals. EE for her histrionic Tutrp Newspaper Re- PORTER . talents in brilliant theatrical functions.” Treasurer of “The Society for Birth Control,” Honorary member of “The Friends of Vasectomy.” A DEBUTANTE A GENTLEMAN . . Unmarried and uncelebrated. Celebrated as husband of the divinely beautiful and erudite society leader, who is President RAILROAD PRESIDENT of “The Friends of Eugenics,” Vice-President of ““The Woman’s Socialist League,’ Founder of The New Mara Snobian. Celebrated as husband of “Patrick Odd.”’ Well-known clubman and inventor of the “Prohibition Cocktail.” +e as husband of ‘“‘Miss SporTSMAN Nora Ibsen.” Renowned for his game of golf. SupreME Court JUDGE Celebrated as the democratic father of the democratic Duchess of Westchester. SENATOR 64 Characters Celebrated society leader of the young married set, universally known as “Patrick Odd.” Patrick Opp . Dadaist poetess, Cubist painter, Futurist musician, fervent Bol- shevist, exotic jazzer, charity worker. Vice-President of “The Friends of Einstein.” Daughter of a world - famous yachtsman. Socialist and cele- brated “Society matron around whom revolves an _ unceasing world of gaiety.” President of “I Feed a Baby Society,” Secre- tary of “The Friends of Freud.” “Popular member of the most exclusive set,’ militant leader of “The Friends of Pugilism,” A Lapy . of the Suffragettes, President pe on a Hse N world-famous golf and_ tennis champion, universally known under her maiden name of “Miss Nora Ibsen.” Mayor of New York City. World- famous political genius, ardent feminist. His Honour Patrick Mu.tuican SwEENY Of a private Sanatorium near Heap Doctor . New York. Assistant doctor in same Sana- INTERNE . torium. 65 Mumbo Jumbo Lunatic in same Sanatorium, who Henry Mu.ier. ef thinks himself the world-famous “Loyal Painless Thompson.” Also a lunatic in same Sanatorium, Rev. SIMPpKIN-SANDS . who thinks himself the world- famous Mr. Wanamaker. torium, who thinks himself himself. Another lunatic in same Sana- Don QUICHOTE . Arrant snob. Celebrated chauf- feur to the Duchess of Mande- lieu. Vice-President of ‘The Friends of Motor Culture.” MacGuHeEeE . Orchestra, Porters, Lackeys. 66 Characters John Brown—Later known as Mervyn Tall, slender, and about thirty years of age, with spare, short, straw-coloured beard growing into two points. His hair is long and straight, after the tra- ditional fashion of young artists. His large, blue, introspective eyes, veiled with subjective dream, seem to be looking in rather than out, and mirror a pure, limpid, guileless nature. He has the slow, vague, un- decided movements of a somnambulist, and his rare gestures are of one who is living in a trance, or under a mystical spell. His lofty, luminous forehead entirely overbalances a narrow chin and a small, sensitive, tremulous mouth. With long slender hands and feet, tapering fingers, small mouth and ears, diminutive teeth, scanty beard and elongated oval face, he has all the characteristics of a declining aristocracy of the past, for the effete, newspapered, so-called aristocracy of to-day is so intermarried with millionaire butcher, grocer, pork-packer and Jew that it has become degen- erate not from over-refinement, but rather from over- crassness, and more often than not out-porks pork- packer in hog-wallowing vulgarity. There are, for- tunately, a few left whose aristocratic strongholds have not yet been stormed by fanatical or sentimental scientists, baseball swats, social Press agents, jazzing democrats and cinaphonafans. Occasionally, when speaking of his pictures, Mervyn displays the impulsive enthusiasm of a little child, which is only momentary, however, as he soon relapses into his former apathy, and withdraws again behind the veil which separates him from the objective world. 67 Mumbo Jumbo As twilight shimmers and plays through a grove of spring leaves, so do expressions of sweet melancholy, gentle bewilderment and mild apprehension hover and flit over his hyper-sensitized, ascetic face, which never blooms into merriment, although it is occasionally brightened by a faint, delicate smile of affectionate sympathy. At times his pale face appears to be illuminated by an almost supernatural light, the effect of which is intensified by his shock of yellow hair, forming, as it were, an aureole about his head. The Flemish and Italian primitives would have found in Mervyn an inspiring model for their heads of the Christ. In those happy, aristocratic, unmechanical days before the printing press had begun to press be- lief, hope, art and spirituality out of humanity, and when the Church was the high altar of faith and igno- rance, the temple of love, dream and legend, and the womb and cradle of the artist, Mervyn would have had an outlet, through creative expression, for all the beauty of his sensitive, delicate imagination and rare refinement which have been submerged below the surface of his consciousness in the twilight of his subconscious- ness by the hideous materialism, bluff, vulgarity, bru- tality and overwhelming charlatanism of our epoch. Although Mervyn has grown up in a peaceful little village in France, he has nevertheless been over- shadowed from childhood by the ugly, sordid spirit of our times, symbolized in the slick, arrivist, serialized leer of “Loyal Painless Thompson,” whose portrait, painted on an enormous blue and yellow bill-board, advertising laxatives, and erected in the field opposite 68 Characters his mother’s house, has been grinning at him ever since he can remember from over the wall into his garden, and through his bedroom window. Had Heine lived until the end of the nineteenth century, he would probably not have declared that “There is nothing new under the sun, and even the sun is a warmed-up joke,” for he would have seen Art for the first time in the history of humanity invaded by impostors, necromancers and ‘Loyal Painless Thompsons” who, realizing the unlimited possibilities of suggestion through the ever-increasing facilities of propaganda and advertisement, not only started in to exploit the public with art-shams as they have with nostrums, but have even succeeded in having them- selves accepted by their bleating bemused flocks as geniuses of Art. This preposterous hoax has finally been carried so far by these expert commercial psy- chologists, suggestionists and mercantile mesmerists, that the mutton-headed public is now as ready to swallow any critic-coated idiocy for art as they are sugar-coated bread pellets for liver-pills, or coloured sea-water for hair lotion. Mervyn is Art, weakened, corrupted, diseased, degen- erated and driven mad by democracy, science and power-machinery, which have turned the studio into publicity bureau, photographic parlour, news agency and laboratory of charlatanism, and filled it with ava- ricious, psychological empirics; brokers of genius; scientific mountebanks; perverse self-exploiting art- leeching critics; press-phobians ; news-delirians; mech- ano-monomaniacs; victimized neurasthenics; art pro- 69 Mumbo Jumbo moters; spell-binders; culture-vultures ; flabbergasted | “arty” blatherskites; wiggle-waggling, hocus-pocusing third-sex suffrag-“‘ists” and “ettes”; humdrum old spinsters craving “arty” sex-thrills, and fed on pish- posh and flap-doodle by bamboozling, art-foozling huck- sters; nocturnal echidnas, giglots, Menads, flappers and monkey-doodling flubdubs, drunk with balderdash of “ists” and “isms”; high-brows, whipper-snappers, popinjays, lackadaisical louts, and new-fangled nin- nies, calling themselves maestri; temperamental, harum- ~ scarum squirts, and nincompoops posing as supermen; esthetic jack-nasties, jackanapes, thingum-a-gigs, and scallawags; artistic jub-jubs, boos, snarks, jaber- woks, boojums, and punchinellos, followed by their press agents; puddle-ducks, rag-tags, bobtails, and geese with brains and livers congested from tommy- rotten mass education crammed down their throats by higgledy-piggledy idealists, egocentric uplifters, cul- ture-cads, fanatical mob-muddlers, and silly, shilly- shally, lollipop, molly-coddle sentimentalists; and last, but not least, gilded, la-di-da, highfalutin lady and gen- tleman cuckoos, who lavishly pay to have their sterile eggs hatched into museum-dodos by sycophant, jackal artists. Mrs. Brown She is nearing sixty, simply but tastefully dressed in grey silk, with a point de Venise collar fastened at the throat by a large cameo brooch. Her wavy grey hair is parted in the middle and drawn down over her ears, from which are suspended long, old-fashioned earrings. ‘The wrinkles of her sensitive pale face har- 70 Characters monize with the delicate beauty and loveliness of her expression, radiating benevolence, tolerance and refine- ment; which qualities, with gentleness of manner, are rapidly disappearing from the modern woman who, with votes sticking out of her overcoat pockets, sex relegated to laboratory, and birth to hospital ward of labelled shelf and ticketed infant, looks as if she had been gazing at spark-plugs, valves, clutches, stop- cocks, magnetos, gears, pistons and cranks, etc., rather than at the flowers of the field. An American by birth, and descendant of one of Virginia’s oldest and most aristocratic families, which had been ruined and practically exterminated by the Civil War, she was taken to England, while still an infant, by her widowed mother—her father, a gallant Confederate officer, having given his life in defence of one of the most refined, happy, dignified and aristo- cratic civilizations of the last century." Her mother, broken in heart and spirit, died shortly afterwards, leaving her daughter to the care of some distant Eng- lish relatives, who adopted the orphan out of pity for the mother and sympathy for the Southern cause, with which the virile aristocratic England of those days 1“It is not yet certain that the world will be better for the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America. It is not yet certain that this victory was a good thing.”— G. K. CHeEsTErTON. I, for one, am certain that it was a very bad thing, as it meant the triumph of mongrel democracy and dehumanizing industrialism, over an agricultural, aristocratic, highly humanized civilization. Carlyle was also certain, and moreover epitomized his certainty in the following immortal lines: “The South said to the black, You are slaves, God bless you! The North said to the black, You are free, God damn you!” 71 Mumbo Jumbo naturally sided; not having been contaminated, as she is at present, with the degenerating virus of vulgarity, and the unscrupulous, democratic hoax of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” (Norse.—As God in His wisdom has created upper and under dog, why viciously taunt the under one, between nips and bites, by fraternally telling him that he is free, equal, and even your superior?) At an early age she married John Brown, a prom- ising young English artist, and went with him to live in France, where their only son, John, who, later on, became world-famous as a painter under the pseudonym of “Mervyn,” was born. As Mrs. Brown has always found happiness and ful- filment in affection, devotion, loyalty and love, her life can be of little interest to the steel-bound, pipe- encircled, bill-boarded world of to-day, which has no time to concern itself with those who ‘are without ambition to see themselves reflected in its mirror of vanity, or more particularly with those who have no desire to exploit themselves through its newspaper, magazine and psychological laboratory of self-adver- tisement. For instance, it never occurred to Mrs. Brown, when her husband died, to have herself cinematographed and photographed, after the touching manner of our mod- ern weeping widows, in a dramatic position on his tomb, with hope of seeing her overwhelming grief filmed and illustrated in the daily Press. Nor, strangely enough, did the thought of having herself interviewed and “written up” as an unselfish, self-sacrificing, saintly mother ever cross her mind. 12 Characters She is of the chosen few who instinctively know and feel that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and consequently the word gratitude never dangles from her gift. She is simple, credulous and unsuspicious, like all uncomplex, sunlit, pellucid characters who, not having dark corners in their own souls, do not look for shadows in others. For never has a more biologically profound statement been uttered than “It takes a fox to catch a fox.” (I, being more than less of a fox myself, know whereof I speak!)* Like so many old-fashioned women, she merely con- tinued to do “her bit” in war time, as she had always done in peace time—unnoticed, unthanked, unrewarded. She is the type of woman worthy to have mothered those generous, blithe-spirited, immortal singers of The Skylark and Ode to the Nightingale, who, accord- ing to our modern blankety-blank versers of sky- scrapers, boilers, plumbing and machines, are no longer worth mentioning. Isaac Kougelman A dapper protuberant little man, around fifty-five. He is clean-shaven save for a very small tooth-brush moustache. His slightly bald round head pivots on an invisible neck. He exudes prosperity, health and self-satisfaction. His large black eyes, in pockets of puffy flesh, gleam with commercial activity and success. Between his thick sensual lips his tongue frequently 1“We confess our little faults only to persuade others that we have no great ones.”—La RocHEFOUCAULD. 73 Mumbo Jumbo appears, and with dilating nostrils he seems to be con- tinually enjoying his senses of taste and smell. He wears the regulation officer’s uniform of the Y.M.C.A. in the last war. It is aggressively new, and his shoulders are padded after the American fashion. His tight Sam Brown belt accentuates his large hips, and makes him appear to be wearing a bustle. With his glittering buttons, shining leathers, creased trou- sers, glinting spurs, and pomaded head, he gives the general impression of having just popped out of sacer- dotal sartorial sanctuaries and bon-ton distingué ton- sorial salons. His voice is unctuous and persuasive, except in mo- ments of emotional stress, when it rises to a shrill key of anxiety and timorousness. On his small plump cupid-like hands sparkle rings, set with large cabochon emeralds and sapphires. Occasionally the trace of a very slight foreign accent may be detected in his speech. He is obviously an American Jew of the Ashkenazim. Joseph Rosengarten A tall, svelte, strikingly aristocratic American man of about forty-four years of age, with massive brow and black deep-set meditative eyes. His nose, expres- sive of rare distinction, is long, slender and aquiline. He is clean-shaven, and his straight, jet-black hair, combed back without a parting, intensifies the mat- white colour of his face. He is also dressed, like Kougelman, as an officer of the Y.M.C.A.; but his clothes, although smartly cut, look neither old nor new, and he wears them with the 74 Characters accustomed ease of an English officer. His leathers have the patina of dark mahogany. As a pure offspring of the Sephardic Jews, who, from the eighth century to the discovery of America, inspired, directed and dominated the statecraft, litera- ture, arts, sciences, and general culture of Spain, he has preserved through the intensive atavism of a perse- cuted race the physical characteristics of his noble masterful forbears. He has a mellow, modulated voice and speaks without either an English or an American accent. He never laughs, but occasionally his face lights with a smile of philosophical irony tinged with sadness. His move- ments have the grace, power and litheness of a tiger. His gestures are controlled and co-ordinate harmoni- ously with his thoughts. The intellectual dome of his forehead is counter-balanced by a firm lean jaw and a resolute but sensitive sensuous mouth, unlike the com- pressed predatory mouth, fleshy jowl, and pugnacious chin, so characteristic of his compatriots, who are rush- ing up with what they call “pep and punch of he-men,” a clap-trap civilization. For the time being, this mechanical civilization is dominating the world, but it is doomed ere long to crumble, as it is founded on false values, unhealthy, misdirected egoism, and sham senti- mental idealism, which inevitably bring about class- hatred, sex-antagonism and unbelief. Ellen Flanngan Ellen is a daughter of the Emerald Isle, of myth, folk-lore and love-lore; and although she is over sixty, 79 Mumbo Jumbo with snow-white hair, her small, closely set, kindly, light china-blue eyes still twinkle with the humour- mystic light of “Old Erin.” She has the form of a pillow tied in the middle, snubby, optimistic, potato-nose, large, elastic, generous mouth, and long monkey-like upper lip, which she uses like a drop-curtain to conceal a gaping space in her upper gum. From her religious, superstitious depths bubbles of humour, quizzicality, devotion and wonder rise to the surface of her sympathetic, kindly face, to burst into rippling circles of Gothic expressions. Banshees, spooks, gnomes and pixies play a very lively part in her honest old head, and the pleasurable fears and delightful tremors of mystery she experiences from her fundamental belief in these “‘little folk” afford her far more happiness and gladsomeness of spirit than her Americanized sister Bridget derives from all the mechanical, vulgarizing, brutalizing amusements and standardized distractions of New York. For, shortly after her arrival in the “Land of the Free,” Bridget not only lost the liberty of her imagination, but also all respect for her beautiful, poetical, Celtic traditions, which she was told by her husband, an Irish policeman who had previously had his faith boiled out of him in the American melting-pot, were all “bunk.” It was not long before the old faith, reverence, and true self-respect were boiled out of her too; but she soon found substitutes in The Police Gazette, 'Tammany Hall, the Great White Way, sky-scrapers, Coney Island, and democracy in general. Old Ellen suggests a character in a lovely moonlit 76 Characters fairy tale, wherein she might be the faithful old nurse to a shepherd lad who turns out to be of Royal birth and marries the King’s fair daughter. And, after all, is this not infinitely more delightful and inspiring than the climax of our modern fairy tale, where lynx-eyed newsboy and slick guttersnipe, through sharp practice, flattery and hypocrisy, turn into pompous, fatuous kings of tacks, sardine-tins, and patent bottle-stoppers, or into unscrupulous, self-righteous, mealy-mouthed, flaccid-jowled Senators, who take their autocratic selves far more seriously than they do their beloved Republic? This faithful, full-hearted old Irishwoman, who finds dignity, honour, happiness and self-expression in the service of gentle, cultured people, belongs to a type which, like many others expressive of higher aristo- cratic civilization, is rapidly being crushed out of exist- ence by the steam-roller of Democracy. This hideous levelling machine has already flattened jewelled-crowned Emperor into pot-hatted President; statesman into politician; artist into commercial illustrator, quack psychologist and mountebank suggestionist; church- man into showman; grande dame into demi-castor; virgin into demi-virgin; scientist into commercialized comfort-cracked inventor; grand seigneur into “good- mixer”; gentleman into middleman; courtier into hotel manager; guest into P.G.; poet into journalist and self-exploiting mercantile prig; family doctor into fee- leeching specialist; peasant into factory theow; arti- san and craftsman into serf of machine shop; man and woman into sex-equality; lover into psycho-analyst ; sweetheart into suffragette; Louise, Trilby, Mimi, into 77 Mumbo Jumbo Taylorized Casino “Cornuchettes”; and—Ellens into Bridgets. The Holy Virgin An Early Renaissance statue, slightly over half life- size, carved out of wood. Most of the gilding has disappeared, leaving the plaster underlay visible. Traces of polychromy remain. On the head is a high ornate golden crown, a por- tion of which has been broken off. The right hand and arm are missing. A greater part of the base and bits of the drapery have been knocked away, leaving sur- faces spongy with worm-holes. Her exquisitely small head, poised on a long liliaceous neck, suggests, in the words of the poet, a bell-flower swaying on a slender stem. Although shattered and disfigured, this graceful, gracious figure of the Holy Virgin still retains the mystical, celestial loveliness and spiritual beauty con- ceived of by an aristocratic age, founded on faith, reverence, noble aspirations, and a self-respecting sense of vital vigorous class distinctions: qualities which have since been sucked out of humanity by the double- headed warty octopus of democracy and _ power- machinery. Her tender, sensitive, compassionate smile and the wistful naive purity and ethereal sweetness of her expression would hardly meet with the approbation of our bobtail, cocktail, bob-haired flappers; sporting, sweatered, gum-chewing, clubby, swaggering, swearing ‘“he-women”; silly, supercilious super-sales-ladies ; political viragoes; office-seeking vixens; brazen bediz- 78 Characters ened biddies and mechanized factory jades, decked out in the very latest Paris models serialized in East-side sweat-shops; husband beaters; sex-equality shrews; scientific termagants; lady-chairmen, lady-charwomen, lady-bird professors, lady-bug parlour socialists ; com- munist vampires ; war-decorated succubi; polyandrists ; militant suffragette furies; Gibson, Fisher, Christy & Co.’s vamping little daughters of democracy; globe- trotting cosmopolitanized beldams; professional society plutocratic press-belles. I also fear that were our Virgin to materialize, she would be found lacking in “snap” and ‘‘go” by our tired business men who, tricked out with every con- ceivable kind of clasp, snap and button, and with *“Tdeal’? fountain pens and “‘Eversharps” hooked to their pocket with “‘Winterbottom’s True-lover-clips,” “bid you Good-morning from behind a Robert Burns cigar” when—they are not too tired. I can hear Rooseveltians too denouncing her as a mollycoddle without ‘“‘pep.” The “regular guys,” of whom we are told by the Literary Digest Lady Astor is one, would unquestion- ably find her “perfectly punk.” Our clean-cut haber- dashered Adonises, wearing the ‘‘World’s Smartest Collar suggestive of Dressy Dignity”; “’Topkis Union Suits, giving comfort at every point from neck to knee”; “Nettleton Shoes, the criterion by which style is set’?; “Ventilated, Love-meshed Straw Hats with Apollo Rims”; and “Soul-stirring Ties of Passionate Pattern”; would find her simply “bum” in comparison to their jazzing athletic “cuties” with “fa skin you love to touch,” and dressed in “alluringly distinctive fault- 79 Mumbo Jumbo less sport togs,” “celestially chic Onyx Pointex Hosiery,” and ‘ethereal luxite lingerie for Debs and Sub-Debs.” Ritzonians would think her dowdy, provincial, uncul- tured and prudish; Greenwich Villagers and Rotun- dians would brush her aside, as they do all beautiful things, with a self-satisfied gesture of utter scorn. To scientists she would appear ignorant, uneducated, superstitious and childish; and Communists, Marxists, Bolshevists and intellectual Labourites would hate and despise her for being compassionate and human. Our poets, philosophers and writers, who strut down corridors of newspaper fame scattering in their literary paths of glory “Goddams,” “bloodies” and “to hells,” etc., which they imagine are symbols of superman viril- ity, would surely consider The Madonna stuck up, unresponsive, cold, affected, idiotically aloof, and, in fact, an appalling bore. Apropos of Goddams, I have just been confronted by at least half a thousand of them “in the most monumental work that has ever flowed from the pen of an American author.” To be sure, nowadays, every book that flows from the pen of an American author is not only monumental, but immortally so. America, however, will never be- come overcrowded with immortal monuments, for as soon as Americans begin to suspect that they are really in front of something permanent and unchangeable, they not only become restive and nervous, but unhappy, miserable, and even terrified. And alas! I even feel sure that our new-fangled men of God who advertise and popularize religion by turning their churches into cinema halls and variety 80 Characters shows are, in their heart of hearts, secretly ashamed of what they necessarily must consider a reactionary spirit in Mary, Mother of Jesus. And woe to him, in these progressive times, who is suspected of that car- dinal sin—reactionaryism. This statue of the Holy Virgin was fashioned in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, in a small humble workshop, where a young artisan, Giu- seppe Delfiore, worked, in the midst of his devoted family, on Sundays, holidays, and odd moments when he was not employed in the studio of Ghiberti, one of the great Florentine sculptors to whom he was appren- ticed, and where he met the nobility of Tuscany, who were always most friendly with the artisans, and gen- erously encouraged them in every possible way. Giuseppe, like all his friends engaged in the various handicrafts of the epoch, worked with the joy and zest of self-expression and belief, from which are derived the highest and noblest forms of human happiness. Although Giuseppe was merely an average artisan of his period, and could neither read nor write, and had never ventured farther than a few miles from Flor- ence, he nevertheless had received a far more compre- hensive education and a more basic and traditional instruction in his art and all handicrafts connected with it than is given to the newspapered, magazine- reading, commercialized, travelled, gimcrack art worker of to-day. In dignity, as in courtesy and refinement there are few, even among our most favoured classes, who would not suffer in comparison to him, and he was far supe- rior, both morally and spiritually, to our average college 81 Mumbo Jumbo graduate, whose B.A. applies more to Bachelor of Ath- letics than Bachelor of Arts. If civilization means machinery and the highest pos- sible perfection of material comforts, we have then arrived at heights never before dreamed of by humanity. If, on the contrary, civilization is dependent on internal qualities, which I believe it to be, we have sunk to a depth of vulgarity, viciousness, brutality, dishonesty, amorality, trickery, and utter disregard of considera- tion for others, never before reached except by the most savage and cruel tribes, and by civilizations in the last stages of decadence. ‘You are the mystical, instinctive, unfathomable love I feel for my well-beloved mother, of whose flesh I am; and the mystical instinctive unfathomable love I feel for my beloved wife, out of whose flesh my children have come. You are mother, wife, and daughter in one, and I shall come to You with love of father and son, for You are the Holy Mother of fathers and sons. “When I was a little child You smiled down upon me from your glittering altar in the great dark cathe- dral, and I felt comforted and reassured. You were my mother, and my mother was You. And from every cross-road and from every nook your welcoming arms were stretched out to me. And now as a man I come to You for comfort and reassurance, for You alone can give me hope and tenderness and encouragement. And You alone still smile upon me as You did from your glittering altar in the great dark cathedral, and fill my heart with belief and gladsomeness; for I am still as a little child in the presence of your serene 82 Characters purity, your heavenly beauty and divine compassion. *““May God give me strength and power to express through my Art the mystical instinctive and unfathom- able adoration I feel for You through my beloved parents, my beloved wife, and my beloved children.” These and many similar thoughts flitted through the mind of Giuseppe Delfiore while he was carving virgins out of wood to be placed in shrines and chapels on highways and byways, where nowadays grin the hideous faces of “Loyal Painless Thompsons,” advertising their nostrums. And now, after four hundred years, this most beau- tiful and inspiring of all symbols, from which humanity has derived infinitely more hope and solace than it ever will from science, comes to us through the hands of the Jews, broken and shattered, to be finally landed in an insane asylum, after having been betrayed by Phil- istine and Pharisee, stood on its head by vulgarity, commerce and science, and, with tricked, dissimulated restoration, fraudulently sold as an Old Master to Ezra P. Packer, the American king of chewing-gum. Moses Stein In the fifties, tall, lank, clean-shaven, with thick grey hair and a long or, as a “New Republic sort of person” would call it, dolicocephalic skull. He has the skin, colouring and harmless expression of a bibliophile. This scholarly impression he heightens by wearing the horn-rimmed spectacles of a Chinese sage. The glances of erudition and profound wisdom which 83 Mumbo Jumbo he casts over his spectacles thrill and kill the super- cultured-crazed American wife, and terrify the sub- cultured-business-crazed American husband. His habitat for the last years has been a large plush sofa in the middle of the Kougelman Galleries, where he may be found meditatively roosting, like a great owl, with his forefinger thrust between the leaves of some classical book on Art. He has as instinctive a flair for promising clients as has an owl for gorged mice scuttling back to their holes after a riotous night in well-stocked larders. “Friends of Art” and Art collectors find themselves in conversation with him without being aware of how they drifted into it. Even the most uncultured of our “cultured ladies” are delighted to find, after a chat with him, what a sensitive appreciation they have for Art. Later this discovery is well rubbed into their poor ignorant hus- bands’ who, out of self-defence, are finally forced to invest in one or more canvases or art objects from Kougelman & Co. Moses Stein is as skilful in his “cultural masquerade” as is our modern arrivist, or political rogue, in his democratic one; and like Kougelman, who is “‘gotten up to beat the band,” Moses is gotten up to beat the “arty hourgeois.” Van Rensselaer-Levineson Of average height, slight, and about fifty-two years of age, with small closely cut beard. In every way he tries to accentuate his slight resemblance to the King 84 Characters of England, on whom he has evidently patterned him- self, He speaks with an affected English drawl, and wears a monocle, which he is either constantly adjusting in his eye or dangling between thumb and forefinger. He is an American Jew, born in the slums of New York, of Russian parents. With splendid pluck, steel-like determination, and rare ability, he finally succeeded, by toiling all day and following courses in night-schools, in entering Harvard University, entirely unaided, where he worked his way through by coaching rich, dissipated class- mates. Having started as a child by cadging plaster statu- ettes on Broadway, he gradually conceived the idea of a career through Art, foreseeing that America was about to free herself from the bullying, brutal heel of the Irish immigrant conquest,’ and emerge from the epoch of spittoons, backyards festooned with family washing, brown stone fronts, and bearded Mephistophe- lian goats, surveying, with cold, pallid, satanic eyes from mounds in vacant lots, refuse, junk and tin cans. He further realized the great financial and social possibilities of Art expert and critic, when crude, eager 1 As it was an Irish nurse who first spanked my little bottom and unfailingly paraded me through the streets on St. Patrick’s Day with a green ribbon on my bonnet; as I received my first thrashing from an Irish “mick” four years my senior; as it was an Irish “cop” who arrested me for trespassing on his “keep-off- the-grass” plot; as I was first led to the altar of Venus by a fair colleen; and as I discovered on attaining my majority that my home city of New York was morally, mentally, and physically under the control of Irish politicians, I have, quite naturally, referred to this epoch of our history as the Irish conquest. 85 Mumbo Jumbo and socially apprehensive America would begin, with millions, billions, trillions bulging from her pockets, to buy up with democratic American dollars the art treasures of Europe, and corner crowns and coronets for her golden daughters. Shortly after graduation, as a first step in his life’s campaign, he succeeded in arousing, through subtle, Semitic flattery, the interest and affection of a rich, sentimental Boston lady with literary pretensions, for whom he wrote a book on Art, which she published under her name. He became her lover, and when he had gathered sufficient funds from her through pen and passion, went to Oxford for a post-graduate course in Arts and Letters, where he acquired several degrees, an English drawl, and at the same time arbitrarily hyphenated “Van Rensselaer” to his Jewish patronym, realizing how appetizing a common tasteless chub may become to a democratic American palate if served up with a highly seasoned hollandaise sauce on a gilded platter belonging to an old patroon family of New York. On leaving Oxford he obtained a position as Art critic on an English newspaper in Paris, where his skilful use of novel art jargon in literature and con- versation soon made him conspicuous and welcome in the American Art colony. He eventually discovered amazing merit in the insipid work of a wealthy Ameri- can sculptress who, with the skilled assistance of a number of highly paid Italian modellers, had planned, with the usual U.S.A. “pep” and ‘“‘punch,” to outdo Michelangelo. ‘The reward he received from her for 86 Characters his rare discernment in recognizing her genius enabled him to go to Rome. Although a renaissance of appreciation for the Quatro and Cinque cento primitives had been blooming for some time in European Art circles, he saw the possibility of popularizing the movement and carrying it into America. He therefore began to specialize in this epoch, and bought up for a trifling sum all the available pictures he could lay his hands on of an obscure Primitive, about whose life and works he wrote a book. Having thus brought these pictures into prom- inence, he disposed of them at enormous profit to a “primitive” American millionaire. With this book and the sale of these pictures he slid on fame and fortune into the dinner-parties, opera- boxes and boudoirs of the most exclusive femmes du monde. To-day he is universally recognized as the greatest Art critic since Ruskin, and his word is law in the Art world. He is High Priest of erudition and culture in Ritzonian society, and even causes more flit and flutter among culture-stricken ladies than does a Grand Duke or an American multi-millionaire, or the great Bergson himself, before whom some of our over-cosmopolitan- ized ladies have been known to swoon from gongoristic chic. Norman de Puyster Van Loon A gay, sprightly, slim, spick-and-span little man in the fifties, with bald head, large parrot nose, dyed yellow moustache, and light, watery, sentimental eyes brimming with goodwill and kindly feeling. He is 87 Mumbo Jumbo always smartly dressed, and is never seen without a large purple boutonniére in day-time and a white one at night. He reminds one of an exquisitely patterned grey moth with mauve spots, which flutters in at dusk and flutters out at dawn. For years he has fluttered from antiquary to tea-cup, from charity bazaar to dinner- party, from “first night” to cabaret. He is an early Ritzonian, and for over thirty years has been haunting Paris, Venice, Deauville and Cannes. Almost any day during the late autumn and early spring he may be seen taking luncheon at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he is held in high esteem and even affectionate regard by the famous manager, Mr. Ellis, Viceroy and Father Confessor of Ritzonian Society, and Olivier, his celebrated maitre d’hétel and cham- berlain. As descendant of a distinguished old Knickerbocker family of New York, he is most ingenious in subtilely acquainting strangers with his aristocratic birth and titled European connections. Since there now exists in America, behind the gigantic political bluff and social hypocrisy of democracy, more class distinction than in Europe, Americans unfortified by titles have been naturally forced to develop new forms of offensive and defensive snobbism, wherein characteristically they have become specialists and experts. The pyrotechnically witty, progressive and pro- foundly erudite Marquise de Loather, a most exclusive Ritzonian, is his sister. His other sister, after having obtained newspaper fame as a leader of the Militant Suffragettes, divorced her husband to marry a cousin 88 Characters of the Sultan of Turkey. Her book, entitled The Harem, written after she became a Turkish Princess, is considered by Ritzonians to be a most brilliant encomium of Mohammedan faith and a skilful defence of seraglian customs and formalities. Like his compatriots, he is entirely devoid of imagi- nation and true art feeling; but he displays rare under- standing in harmoniously assembling old furniture, bibelots, and works of Art. His apartment in Paris is a small museum of eclectic culture, and has given him the position in the American colony of savant and art- arbiter. For although America is as yet uncreative in Art, she has surpassed modern Europe in good taste, as applied to interior decoration, architecture and landscape-gardening. On his library table among the latest European periodicals is always to be seen The New Republic, to which he would naturally subscribe, as he is, like Van Loons in general, “A New Republic sort of person.” During the Great War the strain and responsibility of giving daily tea-parties to wounded officers and titled nurses so racked his nerves that he would awake at night with a start, to find himself asking his distin- guished but imaginary guests, grouped around his bed, “strong or weak?” and “how many lumps?” This phrase of tea-ritual in time became an obsession, and led to insomnia and nervous collapse. After having been unsuccessfully treated for incipient psychasthenia by a dozen or more renowned neurologists and psychia- trists of Paris, London and Switzerland, he was even- tually cured, at great expense, through suggestion, by a clever Jewish charlatan, who had previously been an 89 Mumbo Jumbo illiterate clown in an itinerant circus, but who, having met with conspicuous success as a healer, finally man- aged to become a protégé of the Duchess of Mandelieu. This quack’s spectacular cure of Van Loon and his book entitled Super-scientific Psychocentric Occultism, written for him by a starving medical student in ex- change for food and a few francs, brought him such celebrity as a worker of miracles that, in order to avoid police explanations for practising without a medical permit, he decided to dedicate his life to God, and thenceforth scornfully refused all fees, but accepted donations, to enable him “to tabernacle in the flesh among my followers and carry on my Saviour’s work.” Mr. Van Loon, on being awarded the Legion of Honour for self-sacrifice and devotion to the Allied Cause, became violently patriotic, and at the slightest provocation would oratorically take to Washington, Lafayette and Sister Republics, as a duck takes to water. In spite of America’s triumphant part in the war, he has nevertheless secretly remained, like all Ameri- cans living in Europe, socially ashamed of his crude compatriots, and would shrink from the thought of being classified as a member of the American colony of Paris, as he considers himself to be a cosmopolitan. In this view he has always received comfort and moral support from his sisters, the Marquise and the Princess, who, in spite of their advanced socialistic views, con- sider it part of their marital duties to scrupulously avoid all Americans, except those possessed of titles through marriage. In order further to distract Euro- pean attention from the social handicap of having been 90 Characters born Americans, any reference to their native land was taboo until the outbreak of the Great War, not- withstanding the fact that the Van Loons, like some other aristocratic American families, could leave a vast number of European titles by the wayside in their genealogical march back to Adam and Eve. But the heraldic fowl of old Europe could nevertheless hardly be expected to allow an uncoroneted American hen to strut about in their emblazoned courtyard on equal social terms without having first laid her golden egg of Democracy in their matrimonial basket of impoverished aristocracy. It is true that during the Great War America rose a trifle in Europe’s social eye, but she has since slid back to her previous plane of social in- feriority. Americans are still given precedence, how- ever, over the black and tan races. Although since the war “Normie” Van Loon has been working up the “popular and_hail-fellow-well-met” policy, I nevertheless wonder if, on returning the recent affectionate and intimate appeal for re-subscription sent out by The New Republic, he wrote “‘you bet” on the margin, as the distinguished editors of that dis- tinguished weekly solicited their distinguished readers to do. (Norre.—Since snobbism is a composite instinct made up of self-preservation, sex, gregariousness and vanity, I would not have you think, gentle reader, that I am not, after my own fashion, quite as much of a snob as our friend Van Loon. Mr. Thackeray, who fathered the word, was unquestionably a vital vigorous one himself. But, curiously enough, although I have heard many 91 Mumbo Jumbo men admit and even boast of their viciousness, treach- ery, dishonesty and brutality, the only person I have ever met who frankly admitted being a snob was a mild- eyed old hermit who collected sea shells and wrote son- nets to Humpty-Dumpty.) The Duchess of Mandelieu In the early thirties, tall, extremely slender, with a magnetic and dominant personality vibrating with un- limited nervous energy. Her movements and gestures are sudden and unexpected, suggesting spontaneity, impulsiveness and sincerity; but an unusually keen observer could detect behind all this histrionic display a cool, calm, calculating brain. She has never felt love or affection, although she can simulate both with rare intensity. She is mental, unscrupulous and amoral, but she enjoys being generous and kind, when these qualities are consistent with her vanity and ambition. Should she, however, be crossed or thwarted, she would be capable of refined cruelty and ruthlessness, even to those dearest to her. From her earliest childhood she recognized jungle law to be human law, and that the true biological strength of women lay in claw and fang of sex attrac- tion, flattery and ridicule; and consequently has re- mained indifferent to unbiological feminist movements. Like all political brains, she skilfully deploys those trustworthy, never-failing old decoys of altruism and love of the plain people, ruses concocted by the first tribal politician to obtain self-advertisement and power. Although of Jewish birth, she is of the most beautiful 92 Characters Italian type, with dark luxuriant hair, camellia-white skin, a delicate slightly arched nose and large mesmeric black eyes. Her lips are stained vivid crimson, and her eyes are darkened. Her face is extremely animated and seductive, and she has a bewitching mannerism of wrinkling her nose and half closing her eyes. Occasion- ally she affects a French accent, but her usual pro- nunciation is mildly English, having diligently and in- telligently cured herself of the nasal stigma of a sexless, sapless, mechanized American twang. Her rapid, ejaculatory sentences are accompanied by soft mocking laughter, gurgling up from her in- stinctive belief that the world is but a puppet show of sham and farce. She is a Ritzonian and one of the leaders of that new cosmopolitan Society, inspired by America and founded by Mr. Ritz, which has supplanted, with res- taurant, casino, hotel and dance-hall, the salon and court life of the past, and substituted hotel managers and maitres d’hétel for chamberlains and masters of ceremony. Born in a New York FEast-side slum of an Armenian Jewish father and Italian mother, she grew up under the three golden balls of her parents’ pawn-shop with fixed determination and haunting ambition to escape from the fust and gloom of junk and cast-off garments, and the sinlit glitter of stolen trinkets, peeping out from dusty shelves and shadowy corners with evil eyes of poisonous insects. At the tender age of fifteen she managed to be res- cued from the sordid meanness and squalid ugliness of her surroundings by a wealthy young reformer engaged 93 Mumbo Jumbo in Utopian settlement work. She soon contrived to have herself seduced by her guileless sentimental young uplifter, and later extorted money from him, by black- mail, in collusion with Patrick Sweeny, a Tammany ward boss who manceuvred the affair. This was her first lesson in practical politics, in which she became an adept during the two years she remained with the boss as his mistress. Her next victim was the sexagenarian multi-million- aire, Mr. Moses Blumenberg, newspaper and magazine proprietor, whom she snared with her wiles and radiant beauty, and then led to the altar, having been ably assisted by her Irish boss, who had placed her to this end with his respected and naive maiden aunt, where he had passed her off to Blumenberg and the world as his lovely cousin. Backed by her husband’s newspaper and financial influence, she fulfilled the pre-nuptial promise given to her faithful “cousin,” by having him made Police Com- missioner of New York. In this post he acquitted himself with such righteous energy and puritanical fervour that he was next nominated by the “Clean Politics League” and elected Mayor on a reform ticket, which position he still occupied at the time of the Mervyn Art Exhibition. As Mrs. Blumenberg, she was a paragon of wives —kind, considerate, capable, light-hearted and enter- taining. Their house became a centre for journalists, politicians and artists; and she wove a spell of such youth and happiness about her old husband that it was | not long before he was entirely controlled and domi- nated by her vivid personality. At his death, some 94 Characters years later, he left her sole heiress to his vast fortune. Although she occupied a conspicuous and influential position, she nevertheless realized that, as the widow of Moses Blumenberg, she could not hope to penetrate into the most sacred circles of New York Society. Consequently, with a parterre opera-box, and Newport in view, she negotiated a second marriage with an im- pecunious but smart young clubman of powerful family connections. She soon exhausted American court life and, seeing the possibilities of a more picturesque and international career abroad, discarded her second husband with a Paris divorce, in order to wed the bankrupt Duke of Mandelieu of Bourbon descent. By this third alliance she secured one of the most distinguished social positions in Europe, and by means of her vast fortune, and psychological understanding of self-exploitation acquired as the former wife of a newspaper owner, became world-famous. As she now felt herself entirely safe and unrestricted with her complacent Duke, she had, like most femmes du monde of past and present, innumerable lovers, not from any sexual temptation, but from an innate sense of vanity, ambition and instinctive desire to torment and dominate the male. Her latest liaison with Van Rensselaer-Levineson (which resulted in the birth of an heir to the ancient Dukedom of Mandelieu) is based, in spite of mild antagonism existing between them, on race sympathy, memories of the bitter struggle and suffering of their childhood, and the literary prestige he has given her, by having written a book and numer- ous brilliant political articles under her name. 95 Mumbo Jumbo Notwithstanding her genuine fondness for Levineson, she has held securely on her hook for several years one of the most powerful Prime Ministers of the epoch, while at the same time carrying on clandestine rela- tions and political intrigues with the foremost leader of the French Extremist Party. It has also been remoured that it was she who inspired a certain famous philosopher to write an essay on sex, contradicting his previous theories, which had caused an upheaval in the intellectual world. For less serious diversion she sur- rounds herself by a court of biddable snoblings and sentimental masochistic chiceurs, of whom Van Loon is one. As arbiter and creator of fashion, the greatest Parisian dressmakers, jewellers, modists and_ shoe- makers compete with each other to obtain the privilege of executing designs created for her by many of the most celebrated artists of the day. In fact, all vendors of art and luxury grovel at her feet. She is the vital, feline, predatory type, belonging to the unscrupulous, conscienceless, arrivist, triumphant modern class of political, religious, scientific, artistic and financial master-charlatans who, ever since the ad- vent of the power-machine and the consequent appear- ance of unbelief and democracy, have gradually ob- tained the direction of human affairs, through every conceivable form of humbug, political intrigue—based on false hypocritical altruism—and scientific commer- cial suggestion, until they are to-day in absolute con- trol of the world’s destiny. Humanity, to be sure, has always been dominated by a small amoral, lawless, brigand group, but it was 96 Characters unquestionably happier under the artisan-made heel of an aristocratic brigand than it is to-day under the serialized boot of a democratic thug. Ezra P. Packer About six feet in height, with massive frame, grey hair, clean-shaven face, and penetrating suspicious eyes. He carries his sixty-five years with the health and vigour of a Captain of Industry who has accumu- lated bulk in body with prosperity and self-assurance. The corners of his compressed slit-like mouth are lost in deep cheek furrows, encircling an ingratiating inlaid grin, which is worn in America as a facial ad- vertisement of success, democratic good-fellowship, and altruistic endeavour. His aggressive combative chin, cloven in the centre, protrudes between flaccid jowls, draped over a heavy undershot jaw. He speaks with the immobile lips of a ventriloquist, in a nasal monot- onous voice. His gestures are few, definite and au- thoritative. He is the old-fashioned type of American magnate who is gradually being superseded by the scholastic ascetic priest of high finance, who is making of business an art, a religion. A dentist’s chair was the cradle of his fame and fortune, for while the dentist was at work on an abscess in his gum caused by an unclean toothpick, the idea suddenly flashed through his mind of the commercial possibility of hygienic toothpicks, sealed in sterilized paper wrappers. From that moment he became ob- 97 Mumbo Jumbo sessed with the scheme, and thought and dreamed toothpick. This inspiration was the result of his being, at that time, book-keeper for a small company manufacturing “Klite Hygienic Toilet Paper” at great profit. He finally managed to interest his employer in his venture, and shortly afterwards the “P.P.C. Tooth- pick,” in crisp gold-tipped envelopes, was introduced into leading hotels and restaurants, while among the galaxy of joyous magazine and newspaper advertise- ments of foods, laxatives, and motors, etc., appeared a diptych of heads: one with bandaged jaw and tragic mien, the other wreathed in smiles and gaily holding a toothpick. Under the former was written: ‘An unclean toothpick, not a spree, Has brought this swollen jaw to me.” While under the latter appeared: ‘‘Now if you would from germs be free, Be sure and use a ‘P.P.C.’ ” This stanza was his first contribution to American literature. In a comparatively short time he tooth- picked his way into a million dollars, which enabled him to ascend the chewing-gum throne and roll up one of the greatest fortunes in America. Having thus become a national figure, his views, not only on finance and politics, but also on Art, literature, sociology and philosophy, were eagerly sought for and published broadcast. About this time he was nominated for the Hall of Fame by one of America’s most popular magazines, 98 Characters along with the “Czar of Jazz,” a celebrated prize- fighter, a world-renowned cabaret dancer, Richard Strauss, a famous free-versing society leader, the illus- trious inventor of the ‘“‘Nyké Letmedoit” carpet- sweeper, and Auguste Rodin. The following logical, obvious reasons were given for Ezra P. Packer’s nomination as an immortal :— “Because he is one of America’s greatest poets of high finance; because his modesty is almost of a super- natural quality; because he carries his keen humour into his game of golf; because his taste, erudition, appreciation and intuition of all that is true, noble and best in art are infallible; but chiefly because he is philanthropist, altruist, royal-good-fellow and the proud father of the clever, lovely Miss Patricia, des- tined in the not far-distant future to be a leader of the Smart Set and one of Democracy’s fairest and most radiant daughters.” As his fame increased, he felt it incumbent upon him, like so many of his great and august contemporaries, to record his triumphs in an autobiography which, according to present-day traditions, was written by his B.A. Secretary. The eulogistic preface to it, contributed by the President of the United States, who largely owed his election to Packer’s enormous party contributions, presented the author to the youth of America as one of the most noble and inspiring examples of American genius and enterprise. This preface was later read by the President himself at the unveiling of the Packer monument in Packerville, the chewing-gum citadel, be- fore thousands of awe-struck spectators who, at the 99 Mumbo Jumbo close of the ceremony, were finally brought to tears by the humility and modesty of Mr. Packer’s little ad- dress, delivered by him from the base of his own statue. He has received decorations from practically every country in the world, and was recently among the first dozen geniuses to be selected from the antiquated, over- crowded Hall of Fame, for a place in a brand new reinforced concrete Hall of Super-Fame. Ezra P. Packer, of unbelief in everything, and half belief in himself, is symbol of our epoch. He is mediocrity crowned by mediocrity; nonentity crowning nonentity; quack crowning quack; fanatic crowning fanatic; ass crowning ass; dunghill crowning dunghill. He is Japan in pot-hat; China without pigtail, and “Son of Heaven” set; mystical Russia with “Little Father” thrown to hyenas of communism; Turkey of unveiled women; Imperial Germany saddled by Ebert; England of Lloyd George, instead of St. George and King George, Emperor of India; Sweden of “By this it is decreed” substituted for “We, Gustave, by the grace of God, King of the Swedes, Goths, and Wends” ; Italy reduced from Doge and Magnifico to democra- tized throne placating thug and cut-throat; Spain with serialized Carmen, gigolo Grandee, and Ritzonianized King. He is France, of Falli¢res-Loubet, Galleries-Lafay- ette, Casino, “‘Monsieur-Dame,” Boulevard Raspail; and sky-scraping America, brandishing and roosevelt- ing a big stick of machine-power progress and altruistic buffoonery in scientific circus of broncho-busting poli- 100 Characters tics, while bellowing for more babes and more votes from an over-populated world which has already voted itself into gutter and slave-driven factory. He is interminable lines of barbered, tailored, im- maculate, perfect gentlemen serving “soft wet goods” and dry goods with lofty condescension, opposite in- terminable lines of modish, manicured, ‘‘coiffured,” paint and powdered perfect ladies of phone, type- writer and counter, wilting from ennui, and supercilious chic, in “decolty” blouse, Louis Quinze heels, spider- web near-silk stockings, and wearing the inevitable cheap imitation pearl necklace, ‘suggestive of that in- tangible something—the atmosphere of select, ‘spiffy’ smart society.” He is Bolshevist negro, with Ford car, wearing Chesterfield collar, Lord Dunraven derby, and distin- guished Oxfords of royal red, indicting civilization in his third divorce suit trial. He is cable, encircling the world to supply Press with gossip, lies, scandal and idiotic drivel about idiotic people. He is a million slick, smart, newspaper reporters, interviewing and snap-shotting a million slick, smart mediocrities. He is “Loyal-Painless-Thompson” lying in wait at every street corner, road-crossing, and car window, to attack you, with his cathartic grin, from flaming bill- boards advertising laxatives. He is factory, kodak, phonograph, sewing-machine, cinema, Ford, tram, telephone, in the gentle, smiling isle of Queen Liliuokalani. 101 Mumbo Jumbo He is self-exploitation, vulgarity and unbelief in pulpit, and—unbelief in pew. He is funicular, crawling over snow-white breasts of the Jungfrau with beer saloon on top; and radiant Riviera pocked with ‘Faux-Arts” villas by “Beaux- Arts” architects. He is trolly-car around pyramid and Sphinx of Cheops; tooting steamboat up and down the Grand Canal of Venice; and dam of commerce submerging the temple-crested island of Phile. He is black intestinal pipe-line gulping up sylvan cascades and crystalline water-falls, to digest them into factories, illuminated nostrums, ‘“‘movies” and casinos. He is frantic Press-hypnotized mob, fighting for smile of approbation from prize-fighting thug, film freak, political crook, and “Colossus of Swat,” with salaries far exceeding that of the President of the United States.* He is Watt, Fulton, Edison, Marconi, Morse, Bell, and all the other scientific toxinators who have mech- anized, enslaved and degraded man, annihilated art by annihilating segregation, destroyed handicraft by fac- tory, sunk humanity into the “Black Ages” of democ- racy, and robbed life of the greatest of all luxuries— leisure and privacy, wherein alone can bloom faith, love, dream, refinement, imagination and individuality. He is decadent monarch in “golf outfit,” “tennis * Dempsey was recently offered $750,000 for one fight. A child of seven is receiving half a million dollars for acting in three films. The President of the United States receives a salary of $75,000 per annum. 102 Characters suitings,” “dress suit” and ingratiating kodak grin, cringing to decadent democracy. He is vulgarized, bankrupt, effete, jazzing European aristocracy, supported by jazzing, democratic daugh- ters of High Finance and Synagogue. He is royal house of England, changing its family name in the face of the enemy; and the enemy swapping “von” for “van” and “de.” He is House of Lords become House of Commons, and House of Commons become House of Mobs. He is eighty-five democratic New York couples being married in a body by Deputy-Clerk James McCormick. He is chic sons and daughters, tangoing in chic casinos a week after their parent’s death, with wine- soaked, food-crammed, wiggling, piggling, democratic society unshocked. He is sanctified Chamber of Commerce, bluff, and bunkum; salon of motors; saloon of art; Rialto of religion; chapel of cinema; three ringed circus of prog- ress, civilization, and uplift; and Corridor of Fame crowded with dancers, pugilists, mountebanks, swash- bucklers, suffragettes and clowns. He is “arty” Zoo with musty dives and fusty cab- arets, packed with monkeys, donkeys, parrots and geese; all Dionysians and supermen, all psycho-analyt- ical geniuses of myriad complexes, and all chattering, braying, jibbering, honking, over new art, new thought, New Republic, free love, free verse, pure reason, pure science, pure socialism, pure rot; with Greenwich Vil- lage fur and “Rotundian” feather ruffling in contentious indignation at the very thought of comparing such antediluvian bourgeois as Phidias, Bach, Shakespeare, 103 Mumbo Jumbo and Leonardo with their “Big Six” or “Big Nine” super-apes of latest “ists” and ‘“‘isms.”? And this is what democratic education of the masses has done for buxom farmer lass, happy artisan lad and simple, hon- est country boy. He is unending chains of processional caterpillars, blindly following, with sentimental earnestness and weary step, Baedeker, Cook, and other leaders of “educational offensives” and “culture drives,” with hope of quickly returning home for the purpose of “putting it all over” the great mental unwashed, who have not yet been “Baedekered,” “Cooked,” seasoned and re- fined by European travel, and Encyclopedias of Soeial Etiquette showing one for a couple of dollars how to appear to be what one is not. He is pseudology, pseudoism; adulterated food, mocado stuffs, dicky shirt front, dicky social front, dicky house front, and all modern dicky fronts; com- position stone, artificial marble; counterfeit jewels, furs, lace, porcelain; faked “fold masters”; tricked antiquities, “near” fabrics, “‘simile” tissues, fraudulent remedies, humbug lotions, trumpery tonics, spurious art, science, religion; feigned faith, mimic happiness, kodaked grief; mock manner, gesture, grin; bunkum altruism; bluff, sham, deception, fraud, cheat, and— imitation corpses fabricated in a United States factory and shipped to Egypt to be sold as mummies to unsus- pecting tourists. He is (“by special cable to the Herald’) “Charles Mason, negro hod-carrier who, while on way to work, is arrested for speeding in his automobile.” He is democratized “Tribes of Osagian Indians, 104 Characters gathering in Oklahoma for intertribal dances and ar- riving in expensive motor cars, piloted by drivers with silk shirts and top hats.” He is “Walrus and Carpenter” of business com- bines, trusts, monopolies and giant Democracies, “munchin’,” “crunchin’,” “punchin’,” and “gobblin’ ” up, for the sacred cause of progress, humanity and civilization, defenceless little oysters, while weeping briny tears of pity and compassionate love as they feel them slipping by their insatiate palates into capacious self-righteous maws. (Norr.—As a God-fearing man, I fully realize that ‘to those who have shall be given”; but I resent seeing a luscious, goluptious meal guzzled up with Walrus, Carpenter, and democratic crocodile tears.) He is Coney Island, Broadway, Brighton, Atlantic City, Trouville, Ostend, and all the other “magic cities” of “looping the loop,” “bumping the bump,” and “flying the coop,” which are used as safety-valves for Democ- racy’s bursting boiler of morbid egotism, self-conscious- ness, brutality, and proselytizing vulgarity. He is debutante daughters and tea-pouring, jazzing, Einsteining mothers and grandmothers, from every city, town, village and hamlet; paragraphed and photographed in every newspaper, magazine and village weekly—and every one beautiful, popular, talented ; and every one charity worker and art connoisseur; and every one exclusive; and every one democratic, psychic and perfectly unaffected ; and every one a leader of the Smart Set; and all ultra modern, in new thought and new everything, including morals, houses, complexes, manners, husbands, auras, and—all living in mortal 105 Mumbo Jumbo fear of being called reactionary, undemocratic and un- scientific. He is philanthropist, munificently endowing public schools, hospitals and libraries, with mountainous profits from munition, armament, and _ poison-gas factories. He is Eileen Clossen and Sadie Palmer of Rochester, New York, fighting to a “knockout” with bare fists before five hundred spectators, for a Feminist who agreed to marry the winner of the bout. He is soulless science, democracy and merciless machinery, ousting faith, gentle manners, dignity, self- expression, self-respect, reverence, tradition, hearth- love, obedience, and natural class distinction based on tradition, culture, talent, power and wealth. He is ever-increasing herds of baffled, standardized, Taylorized, super-slaves, with engraved visiting cards of “Mr. and Mrs.” as reassuring symbols of democ- racy; repeating the same gesture from dawn of youth to sunset of age, and mumbling about liberty, self- determination and equality in unholy stinking factory hells of shrieking, grinding machinery, which whitman- ized, woolworthized, pullmanized, barnumized Mari- nettis, Stravinskys, Stanley Lees, Piccabias, Sand- burgs, Cocteaus, Tristan Tzaras, Stardales, Huelsen- becks, Wooly-West and Tenderloin idealists rant, rave, squeak and squawk over as Valhallas for super- men. He is Fifth Avenue, Euclid Avenue, Biarritz, New- port, Lake Shore Front, Baden-Baden, Dinard, May- fair, Cannes, Avenue du Bois, of cosmopolitan, stereo- typed, identicalized super-palace-hotel society, stuffing 106 Characters and puffing with food, jewels and motors; dancing and prancing; bobbing and snobbing; gambling, rambling and scrambling after money, notoriety and titles, and —all democrats, optimists, altruists, idealists, parlour socialists, and impassioned lovers of the “poor down- trodden people.” He is Europe, weakened, corrupted, debauched, de- generated by democracy; placating and féting at Genoa and The Hague, for purely venal purposes, the vilest and most heinous traitors to humanity, who, under the fiendish hypocrisy of Bolshevistic altruism, glut and sate their pathological vanity and lust for personal power with the flesh and blood of their defenceless countrymen. He is sex-antagonism, pecking, clucking and scratch- ing for the hen vote, in revenge for unchivalric wooing by the commercialized gamecock, who, no longer daring to herald in the dawn with royal clarion call, timidly awaits the factory whistle, while trailing his tail plumes in dust of sex-equality and democratic hypocrisy. He is volcanic eruption of vanity and perverted ego- ism, burying honour, love, loyalty, friendship under Press and photographic lava of self-advertisement, self- exploitation and self-popularization. He is standardized conventionality, moral cowardice, mob sycophancy, posing as individuality, originality, moral courage and independence. He is bewildered bourgeois shocked and intimidated out of reason and pocket-book by fatuous folly, scien- tific tomfoolery, matter-of-coin viciousness, and calcu- lated obscenity, of bunko-steerers and voodoos in mod- ern art and literature. 107 Mumbo Jumbo He is the Topeka Kansas Journal, “running the Bible as a ‘snappy’ serial, with an instalment every day, and lively newspaper headings for every incident.” He is America, falsifying all human values, and factoryizing, vulgarizing, patronizing, charlatanizing, equalizing, hypnotizing, standardizing the world. He is bridge of scientific progression and spiritual retrogression, over which treacherous, sub-human, pitiless, satan-smiling shepherds are luring their be- foozled, bamboozled flocks into camouflaged slaughter- houses of Communism, despair, madness and horror. He is disappearance of mirth, sentiment, gladsome- ness, dream, melancholy, winsomeness, lyricism, purity, loveliness, spirituality, Colleonic majesty, grandeur, magnificence, serenity of countenance, nobility of man- ner, repose, dignity of gesture, sweetness of expression, gentleness, affection, humility, tenderness, refinement, elegance, romance, loyalty, chivalry, courtesy, leisure, tranquillity, mystery, honesty of purpose, simplicity, respect, naiveté, awe, wonder, charm, aloofness, pri- vacy, asceticism, individuality, moral courage. He is the blackest, most threatening and most un- holy cloud that has ever hung over humanity. Ezra P. Packer is—Democracy. Mrs. Ezra P. Packer Of medium height, elephantine, vigorous, buoyant, and around sixty years of age, with rubific-purple hair, brilliantly painted lps, and face thickly rouged and powdered. She creates the impression, with her roving, social, palace-hotel-corridor eye, of an entranced 108 Characters medium being paraded before the footlights of fashion by the procurers and hypnotists of the Rue de la Paix, who have corseted, dyed, bedecked, bejewelled and crowned her with every cunning and artifice of their vanitied trades. She is the good naive sentimental type of American woman, born to swim in a pond but, having been swept by the rising flood of Packer millions into the sea of wealth and fashion, finds herself out of her depth and gasping for breath in desire to keep pace with her hus- band and daughter, and play the part expected of her by the world, newspapers and social magazines. The most momentous dawn of her life was when she awoke in her brand new monumental Louis Quinze bed, adorned with gilded wreaths, bow knots, and vicious little cupids, which she bought with Ezra in a great department store shortly after they had installed their “Louis Quinze back parlour” behind a high stoop brown stone front in Brooklyn’s most fashionable quarter. At the same time in their antimacassared sitting- room two porcelain cuspidors, elaborately decorated with flowers, doves and amorettes, were stationed on either side of the gas-log fireplace, and on the tasselled plush-covered mantel, between alabaster urns under glass containing wax flowers, was posed a bronze Venus of Milo, with a clock encircled in rhinestones set in her stomach, while Mr. Packer’s cherished large brass spittoon, which had occupied the place of honour on their previous hearth, was relegated, with crayon fam- ily portraits, a moth-eaten stuffed pug-dog with one remaining glass eye, an enormous conch-shell on which 109 Mumbo Jumbo was painted a nude woman clinging to a rock at the base of a tempest-swept lighthouse, and other out- grown treasures, to his bedroom. Having ascended into more exclusive social circles by the acquisition of this new “home,” Mrs. Packer gradually became aware of the necessity of educating herself and husband up to their new level of friends and furniture, and soon their evenings were spent in repeat- ing social catechisms from a widely read book on Etiquette, written by a retired French directress of a New York haute monde boarding-house in collaboration with an imported English ducal butler, who had en- riched himself as major-domo in the services of an American tin-can King. | After they had become initiated into the sacred rights and holy mysteries of what to do, wear and say in “highest society,” and had learned “how to dispose of cherry and grape stones; how to use the finger-bowl and napkin with the grace and ease that bespeak the supreme degree of culture; how to eat lettuce leaves and corn on the cob; how not to eat olives and radishes ; what to say without embarrassment on upsetting a demi-tasse; how to sneeze elegantly, discreetly smother a yawn, conceal a hiccough behind a delicately poised hand,” and innumerable other genteel accomplishments —they felt themselves sufficiently secure and equipped to begin their social campaign. About that time, the august Ward McAllister (who has more fundamentally influenced his country in the last half century than any other American, with the possible exceptions of P. T. Barnum, C. D. Gibson, Joseph Pulitzer, Walt Whitman and Edison) and his 110 Characters Four Hundred were timidly beginning to tiptoe into the rising surf of Wagner and Browning, while the Paris Art Firm of Kougelman & Co., securely mounted on Schreier’s Arab horses and escorted by Charles Jacques’ pages, were scurrying up and down Fifth Avenue with Bougereau, Meissonier, and Henner in their train. It was not long, therefore, before Mrs. Packer recog- nized that these names were necessary shibboleths for further social progress. She consequently joined a Browning Society, and urged Mr. Packer to buy a Jacques court scene; and the following winter even ventured to have a Wagner class, which was arranged and organized by her French Professor, who had be- come a cicerone of culture to Brooklyn’s aristocracy after having changed his name from the Marquis of S. to the Count of A., and escaped from Paris, where he was wanted for various charges of swindling. Mr. Packer had now turned his first million-dollar buoy, and under full sail was headed for the open sea of millions. Their next social cruise landed them in a large double brown stone mansion, the decoration of which, with the exception of the two embossed silver cuspidors—now referred to as “expectoratoons”—was entirely left to the rare taste and discretion of the Count, who “did them up” in grand Louis Quinze style from top to bottom while “doing up” his own pocket- book with Louis Quinze commissions. The Packers again disposed of their latest set of friends and furniture, and assumed their new social duties, this time in “Brooklyn’s élite,” with a staff of servants, including an English butler, Swedish ‘“‘second 111 Mumbo Jumbo man,” negro “odd man,” French chef, Belgian lady’s maid, Irish coachman, Danish footman, Norwegian kitchenmaid, and German, Swiss and Italian house- maids. The Count, encouraged by his Packer windfall, was next heard of in Pittsburg, where he netted a million- airess, returned to Paris, silenced the police with his wife’s purse, became a deputy, and later a pillar of Ritzonian society. Shortly after this, Mrs. Packer realized that to be truly smart it was necessary to have a lover, and con- sequently set her teeth against her New England con- science in grim determination to be as fashionable as her newly acquired acquaintances. This was the most nerve-racking moment of her career; but she emerged from it triumphantly, with the complete satisfaction that she had complied with the exigencies of her new position, and had become a _ full-fledged society “Jubjub.” “As to temper the Jubjub’s a desperate bird, Since it lives in perpetual passion ; Its taste in costume is entirely absurd; It is ages ahead of the fashion.” In their third social offensive they stormed the Brooklyn Bridge and took possession of an enormous Georgian residence on Madison Avenue, built for them by a chic young American architect, who had recently returned from Paris, where he had been thoroughly Latin quartered and Beaux Arts-ed. The interior fur- nishings were carried out by a mundane decorator, who, as far as her relations with the “Louis” were con- 112 Characters cerned, was perfectly pure; in fact ‘the Packers were finally so entirely overcome by her purity that they would proudly point out on every possible occasion their door-handles, telephones, gramophones, toilets, and back stairs to their new set of friends as being “absolutely pure Louis Seize.” The only impurities were the good Packers themselves, for even the cellar was de l’époque. Had it not been for the war, the Packers would have probably died in the arms of “pure Louis Seize” on the fringes of New York’s élite; but they were destined for still greater social glory. At the moment of this play we find them shaking off, in true democratic style, their Louis Seize connections, and making their fourth democratic move into a superb new palace covering an entire block on democratic Fifth Avenue. Their palace this time has _ been gothic-ed and renaissanced by perfect undemocratic Semitic taste into a veritable art museum. Miss Patricia Packer About twenty-five years of age, unusually tall and svelte, with a beautiful small Pre-Raphaelite head, ex- quisitely poised, like an exotic flower, on a long delicate neck. Her lithe, flat, aristocratically angular figure, with elongated limbs, slender high-arched feet and thin tapering fingers, give her an ethereal look of old race and rare distinction seldom seen even among the noblest families of Europe. She, like many American girls, is so startlingly dissimilar, both physically and mentally, to her parents, that one wonders, on seeing them to- 113 Mumbo Jumbo gether, if the family nest had not been surreptitiously visited by some royal mystical cuckoo while the old birds were out in fanatical pursuit of the early worm of wealth and social aggrandizement. After the Packers had received innumerable snubs on account of their ignorance and lack of social train- ing, they gradually realized the supreme importance of higher education and culture, and consequently deter- mined to have their daughter given every possible ad- vantage. They started therefore, from her earliest youth, to have her poor little head intensively stuffed and crammed with learning. After she had been passed through minds of innu- merable governesses, professors and instructors of music, singing, sculpture, dancing and drawing, and had attended every conceivable kind of perfecting and finishing class, her brain became like a grocery shop packed with predigested cultural foods, tabloids of religion, little tins of cold-storage art, extracts of philosophy, canned history, and compounds of science. These mental groceries she served out to her clients, after the fashion of American women, from behind her counter of knowledge and erudition, in neat little pack- ages, tied up with precise little bows, to the unending delight of her proud and awe-struck parents. At the age of seventeen Patricia Packer became secretly engaged to a young Brooklyn swell, whom she dropped (as her father did the cuspidor) for a New- port ‘“‘week-ender” when her parents moved from Brooklyn to New York. Her second engagement was also of short duration, as the Packers gradually dis- covered through T'own Gossip and officious friends that their daughter’s fiancé was only a “near” Newporter. 114 Characters Her third venture was with an attaché of princely birth in the German Embassy. The war put a sudden end to this romance; her pangs of disappointment, how- ever, soon disappeared in intensive Red Cross work. The war came as a great blessing to Mrs. Packer and her daughter, who rapidly donated and hospitalled their way into medals, war decorations and the most restricted circles of New York and Paris society, while Mr. Packer was doubling fame and fortune in munition factories. For almost three years the Packer name appeared daily in the foreign Press—Miss Packer asking to have old shoes sent to her address, while her mother spe- cialized in shirts and underclothes for refugees. Miss Packer, who might have stepped out of the pages of Les Femmes Savantes, regards with critical eye the younger generation of American girls, who, she declares, “are rapidly being whirlpooled by decadence into mental and moral chaos.” She, like many chic, up-to-date young ladies of the ‘exclusive set,” is an ardent Socialist and a disciple of Marx. It is hardly necessary to add that The New Republic, The Nation, The Masses, and The Freeman are always to be found on her boudoir table, where Freud, Einstein and an Encyclopedia of Pornography, entitled Ulysses, containing the insane obscenities used by certain unfortunate creatures in Bedlam,’ occupy 1In The Dial, Ezra Pound declares: “This super-novel .. . has more form than any novel of Flaubert’s. ‘All men should unite to give praise to Ulysses’; those who will not may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders.” Miss Patricia therefore extols Ezra, and deifies Joyce, who is now being superized by all of our super-critics. Rotundians, super- Ritzonians and Greenwichites hail him as a prophet; Syndicalists, Bolshevists and Bedlamites idolize him. 115 Mumbo Jumbo the place of honour. The latest foreign publications of Dadaists, Cubists, Fopists, Prigists, and Poppy- cockists are scattered about. Her mother, however, in spite of her daughter’s sneers, still surreptitiously clings to Town Topics and The Club Fellow. Over the mantel in her boudoir hangs one of Picca- bia’s most masterful pictures, The Insides of a Gatling Gun, which has replaced the famous painting of a gollywogging polyhogging lady by Matisse, whom Miss Packer considers to be “really rather too aca- demic.” Recently Miss Packer allowed herself to be dis- covered by several of her intimate friends seated before her Piccabia in tearful ecstasy over the latest volume of poems by “The Super Seven.” ‘This volume has been reviewed in innumerable magazines as “‘One of the most interesting symptoms in the whole literary world, and its publication is very nearly a public obligation.” It has even been recognized by the Rev. Percy Pant to be the apotheosis of poetical expression, and the Rey. Percy in his turn is recognized by the seven supermen authors to be the greatest critic in the history of world literature. The following poem is one of the most exquisite of the collection, and I believe it to be the one which brings tears of appreciation to Miss Packer’s eyes, and esthetic tremors to the Rev. Percy Pant :— Psychoanalytical Cockscombs pale anemic ascetic poles Telegraph poles seeking goals 116 Characters Phantasmagorically through pellucid Peri helions pervasive vacuousness of wires isochronously Vibrating to Virginal Vertigo goya Heliogabulous Red carnations blood for evermore Metadore Oh Christ of Triakisicosahedronic wounds Oh Andalusian harl ot god Nevermore Heartbroken Come Papilionaceously with Yellow leaf and black spots Western Union pale anemic ascetic poles Seeking goals Bleeding heart nevermore At the present moment the socialistic Miss Patricia is being mancuvred by her socialistic friend the Duchess of Mandelieu into a royal marriage with a cousin of the King of the Belgians. Oscar Cadman A tall, self-conscious, emaciated, sallowish, lantern- jawed young man about twenty-eight, with pale eyes, pale hair, and pale personality, into which he has 117 Mumbo Jumbo injected homeopathic doses of U.S.A. “pep” and “punch.” Although he was born with Scottish, Swedish, German and French blood in his veins, he has been so well stewed in the GREAT MELTING-POoT into a pure American type that he could be recognized a block off as one of “God’s own.” From the study of pamphlets and books, concocted in American laboratories of psychology, on new methods of obtaining success, he has acquired, among other accomplishments, the intensely earnest and virilely frank, buoyant, arrivist manner which we are assured in this optimistic literature—showing how any fool may transmute himself into a genius—inspires commercial confidence—the only confidence, by the way, apparently necessary in this epoch. He has, in truth, so successfully soaked himself in every form of scientific and democratic earnestness of manner, that he has become, like all democrats and modern scientists, painfully serious over nothing, even to the extent of putting religious fervour into his *“*how-do-do,” and fanatical sincerity into his “pleased to meet you,” which stereotyped greetings he invari- ably ‘‘gets off” on all introductory occasions with a second-class Rooseveltian ‘“‘he-man” hand-shake. Our women are also rapidly adopting this success- ful manner, which has already been carried into Europe, and is now being made most lucrative and advanta- geous use of by eager shop, financial, and casino folk of all nations. Among political stars, Lloyd George and Briand are excellent examples of it; but they and their con- 118 Characters fraternity have been so influenced by the American domination that they even endeavour to tog and rig themselves up in proletarian masquerade of our Jeffer- sonian politicians, who for some time have realized the futility of bomb and cannon, and have now started out in grim earnest to Americanize humanity with Chris- tian, social and commercial suggestion-science, backed up by their already victorious armies of Press, ’phone, Ford, jazz, phonograph, cinema, kodak, palace-hotel, bill-board, baseball, canned-food, cold-storage, and every kind of hocus-pocus machine and rattle-trap in- vention. European politicians have not yet, however, quite arrived at the carefully studied democratic fancy dress of some of our Western members of House and Senate, who, with interchangeable masks of joviality and almost terrifying altruistic earnestness, realize the vast politi- cal and financial benefits derived from a shabby, greasy, humanitarian, humorous, valiant, brotherly-love, vote- catching slouch hat; an intellectually shiny, pater- familias, unadulterous, patriotic, Lincolnian, philo- sophically-fitting frock coat; honest, simple, virile, loyal, manly, shapeless, up-toed boots; baggy, opti- mistic, kind, generous, good-natured, industrious, sen- timental old pants; an unbuttoned, affectionate, royal- good-fellow, plain-people, normalcy, public-servant waistcoat; and frayed linen, washed with domestic economy, and glazed with irons of civic virtue. At the time of America’s entrance into the war Oscar was a senior in Cornell University, where he had been sent from a small farm in the Middle West by his sweat-of-the-brow hard-working parents who, by 119 Mumbo Jumbo giving their son a college education, fulfilled their most cherished dream. Oscar soon began to simmer and sizzle with war fever. He finally ignited, burst into flame, and was among the first flock of Majors to arrive in Paris at the moment when all Americans living in France were blossoming into maple leaves, acorns, Sam-Browns and spurs, although the only horses they had seen for years were equestrian statues in bronze and marble, and their knowledge of cannon was limited to ancient trophies in front of the Invalides, which was as near as most of them ever got to the front (the Author included). The only person who could probably give a satisfac- tory answer as to why our Knights of Aeroplane, Red Cross and Christian Associations wore spurs, is the White Knight in Alice in Wonderland. It was a bitter blow and cruel disappointment to Oscar’s parents when he returned in khaki to his little home town to bid them farewell before leaving for the front, and even harsh words were exchanged between them. Oscar declared that his parents were too mate- rial, ignorant and uneducated to understand the neces- sity of “making the world safe for democracy,” of “saving civilization” and of “waging a war of right over might to end wars.” ‘Your ma and me ain’t got no book learnin’,” re- torted his old Scandinavian father, “but if this higher education stuff fills your poor head with such darn silly, rotten reasons as that for fightin’, ve’re sorry ve’ve chucked our hard-earned savin’s into the gutter in givin’ it to you. And to think I voted for Vilson 120 Characters yust because he vas ‘too proud to fight,’ and vas going to keep us out of this filthy var of poison gases.” On the day of Oscar’s departure, however, the family unity was re-established by a brass band, waving flags, alcohol, and shouting townsmen, who proudly escorted their Major to the train. After this patriotic send-off, his old parents returned home with tears of joy and pride, and that evening the Stars and Stripes floated over their farm. On the same day that Oscar arrived on a transport at Bordeaux, fired and impassioned with the holy cause of crusading democracy, Boukané Fall, an African negro, whose entire family, along with most of the natives of his peace-loving agricultural village, had been scientifically wiped out by European democracy, was landed at Marseilles with a contingent of midnight blacks, who had been conscripted to defend the sacred cause of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and “right over might,” and thoroughly palavered and “propa- ganded” with such slogans as “fa war to end wars,” and “to make the world safe for the blacks.” They were also informed that they were to save democracy, science and civilization from blood-drinking, man- eating Huns, the most terrible enemies of Mahomet and worshippers of a colossal statue in Berlin representing a monstrous green war devil. But as Boukané had not been given the advantage of mass education, he was too pitifully ignorant to appreciate the impassioned truth and inspired altruism of the above doctrines which Oscar, on the contrary, owing to his university training, was immediately enabled to accept as gospel. But as we hear from all sides that time is money, and 121 Mumbo Jumbo not wishing to rob our busy, buzzy, telephoned, motored, transatlanticized, wirelessed, subwayed, commuted, jazzed, standardized, culture-stuffed, Baedekered, news- papered, magazined, palace-hoteled, psycho-analyzed, super-hygiened, phonographed, cinemad, rushed, hus- tled, bustled, tussled readers of both,’ we will condense Oscar into the following capsule:—Our hero emerged from the war with flying colours, returned to New York, looked for a job, and, “not being a business coward,” invested in success-literature, thereby “in- creasing his mental stature with the secret of fifteen minutes a day”; learned the “cultured, correct way of how to behave in every embarrassing situation”; “how the newsboy became a great inventor and multimillion- aire”; “how to write short stories that actually sell themselves, and movie stories for big pay’; “how not to displease a purchasing agent with halitosis”; “why Jones missed his great chance”; “how to pronounce such foreign words as chic, lingerie, faux-pas, cabaret, Carpentier, Dostoyevsky, Landru, Baudelaire, demi- tasse, demi-monde, demi-vierge, demt-castor, and all the other demis’; “how to exhibit distinction and high breeding by correct, elegant introductions”; “how to be cultivated by everyone in the Smart Set of your home town”; “how to give wonderful parties, which unfrazzle nerves and tickle people pink’; “Show to de velop word power’; “‘how to sell through speech”; “how to impress others with your bed-rock character” ; ‘show to read, love, think, live and make binding friend- ships on wasteless principles”; “how to be nominated 1“Happiness consists in leisure,” wrote Aristotle. Socrates praised leisure as the fairest of all possessions. 122 Characters for the Hall of Fame’’; and, in fact, “how to become one of America’s snappy geniuses.” Unlike Jones, who missed his great chance through psychological ignorance of the “smile and manner which carry conviction,” Oscar, when the opportunity to make good was offered to him by Packer, knew how to return “the smile of fortune,” and “grasp the big job with the manner that spells success.” Patrick Mulligan Sweeny, Mayor of New York A bulky, bald-headed, short-legged, penguin-built man of medium height, in the middle forties, with glit- tering, watchful, pin-head eyes sunk into the gristly fat of a bulbous, formless, smooth-shaven, pasty face. He has the sly, sardonic, predatory smile of certain amphibia and deep-sea monsters, who camouflage them- selves for defensive and offensive purposes into floating logs, or barnacled rocks, or lumps of mud. In like manner does our good Mayor Sweeny, under camou- flage of hearty handshake, hail-fellow-well-met, and democratic bluff and bluster, gulp up votes from his unsuspecting quarry. On oratorical occasions he exudes altruism* from every pore and squirts out 1I never fully appreciated the heroic unselfishness of our political altruists who have consecrated their lives to the uplift of humanity until I came across the following passage wherein Mr. Pecksniff informs us that he even digests his food for the benefit of his fellow men. “The process of digestion,” declares this altruistic utilitarian, “is one of the most wonderful works of nature ... it is a great satisfaction to me to know, when regaling on my humble fare, that I am putting in motion the most beautiful machinery with which we have any acquaintance. I really feel at such times as if I was doing a public service. 123 Mumbo Jumbo obsequious flattery over his constituents and brother- citizens, whom in his democratic heart he despises. For his sisters he has a softer spot. After the above description of him in the flesh, it may surprise and even “‘discomboberate”’ some of my more sentimental readers to know that he has always had amazing success with the “lovely ladies” of all ages, and in all classes of life, whom apparently he fascinates with his brutal, bully- ing, “‘he-man” manner. Although an anti-feminist at heart, he is careful to conceal from the public his true sentiments concerning women, realizing the necessity of working up the blarney bunkum of sex-equality, in order to catch the woman’s vote. He is in a way the modern Don Juan, and owes his prosperity in great measure to his biological knowledge and understanding of the weaknesses of the fair sex, who always succumb to the successful, triumphant male symbolizing the spirit of their time: in days of chivalry it was Knight-Errant and Troubadour; in religious periods it was Crusader; in the Renaissance and other art epochs it was Artist; in war it was Warrior; and in our commercial democratic age of machine, bill- board, and laboratory it is Sweeny. This twentieth- century Lothario looks as if he might have been ex- tracted with triple nickel-plated, patented forceps from the womb of a boiler; suckled from the brass teats of an automatic slot-machine; cradled in a taxi side-car; brought up on canned and artificial food in a machine shop; educated by the venal brutal daily Press in fac- When I have wound myself up, if I may employ such a term, and know that I am going, I feel that in the lesson afforded by the works within me, I am a benefactor to my kind,.”—DicxKEns, 124 Characters tories decorated by mountebank Cubists and worked by standardized Union slaves. At present he is living on the thirtieth floor of a super-palace hotel overlooking a world of glass, steel, concrete and bristling factory spires belching forth the black scientific soot of demo- cratic fraud and imitation. Shortly after his “lovely cousin”—now the Duchess of Mandelieu—left him to marry old Blumenberg, he corralled a well-to-do widow and, as he put it, “‘cinched her up as Mrs. Sweeny.” After having increased his wife’s fortune tenfold through judicious police-graft- ing, he was rich enough to afford the luxury of being moderately honest as Mayor. His brilliant career was, however, very nearly cut short at one time by an intrigue he was carrying on with a famous beautiful leader of the Suffragettes, whose husband, a conspicuous New York clubman, com- mitted suicide on surprising his wife with the Mayor— not in platonic dalliance, but in flagrante delicto. It took all Mayor Sweeny’s ingenuity and political pull to have it conclusively proven in the Press, by accom- modating neurologists and psychiatrists, that he was in no way responsible for the suicide, as the husband was a victim of hallucinations and suffered from per- secution mania. In vicissitude and success Pat’s instinctive respect, devotion, consideration and generosity for his old mother have been unfailing. He also has the open- handed liberality and lavish hospitality rarely, if ever, met with outside of the United States, except possibly among Russians and South Americans. To-day, “P.M.,” as he is affectionately dubbed in 125 Mumbo Jumbo New York, is worth several million dollars, and is one of the most highly esteemed and respected Mayors New York City has ever had. An heroic-size statue of him is at the present moment being executed by a beautiful young American sculp- tress, who is already infinitely more celebrated than Michelangelo ever dreamed of being. This monument, to which “P.M.” was the principal subscriber, is shortly to be erected in his home town of Squeedunk by a committee of proud citizens, who have been so impressed by the political triumphs and Press notoriety of their former townsman, that they have all endeavoured to pattern themselves on him; some imi- tating his manner and gesture, others his speech, and all swapping stories of their good old school days when “Patsey Sweeny was one of the boys.” All of which is rather odd, as he was the most detested boy who ever attended the Squeedunk High School, and for years was known as “Stinker Pat.’? We feel sure, however, that the Beaver and the Butcher, who were members of the “Bellman’s crew,” would have found nothing surprising in the above situation. And now—‘make way! the play may begin.” 126 Mumbo Jumbo ACT I A garden close in Normandy, in the late afternoon of a sunlit Summer day, 1919. To left ts a pictur- esque, two-storeyed seventeenth-century cottage, vine-covered, with overhanging eaves. It is of greyish-pink stucco, beautifully patined by time and weather with glazings of ochres and cool bluish-greys. The wing of the cottage runs diagonally across left rear corner, forming an oblique angle with the high lichen-covered stone wall which encloses the garden and separates it from the high road. In the wall to right rear is a low, narrow, arched entrance, closed by a solid oaken door studded with large square nail heads, and hung on heavy decorative iron hinges. To the right is a long low out-building over- grown with wy. It has a studio window, and door leading into garden. In the centre is an ancient stone well-head of Renaissance design, mounted on two great weather- beaten stone slabs, forming steps. The well-head is crowned with a fine old wrought-iron framework, from which is suspended a wheel with chains for bucket. Encircling the well are large irregular mossy paving stones, with grass and an occasional little flower sprouting from the interstices. Along the walls run flower-borders, bright with roses, lupins and lavender. On either side of gar- den gate are two centenarian yews, neatly clipped 127 128 Mumbo Jumbo in pyramid form. A wise old spreading elm rises in left foreground. Around its base is a rustic bench, near which there is a table and several rattan garden chairs with chintz cushions. The only discordant note to the calm peaceful dignity and refinement of this lovely fragrant old- world corner is a hideous, flamboyant bill-poster, erected in a field on the other side of the high road, and dominating both house and garden. In the hills beyond, other garish signboards are seen. On the one just over the wall is painted an enor- mous head of “Loyal Painless Thompson,” uni- versally celebrated for his cathartics. His mean, unscrupulous, lantern-jawed, chalky jackal face seems to be leering with contemptuous superiority out of the modern world of charlatanism, sham and militant vulgarity, into the gentle, secluded, spiritual refienment of the past. On a glaring blue background, in gigantic blazing yellow let- ters, which strike you like a blow between the eyes, and from which there is no possible escape, ts written: “Loyal Painless Thompson’s luscious little Lollipops for lazy languid Livers.” And below is the following slogan in both French and English:—“We work while you dream”; “Nous travaillons pendent que vous revez.” As no de- scription in these days is complete without at least one “‘super,” I might add that “Loyal Paim- less Thompson’s” face is charged with super- vulgarity and falseness. His daughter, too, is charged with super-cheek and chic, having mar- ried Prince Gigolo Gogo, whose mother was Miss Mumbo Jumbo Vogelheim of St. Louis, daughter of the famous philanthropist and democratic king of “Vogel- heim’s Vitaphospho Varieties.” Before curtain rises, a few long mournful notes of a flute are heard. The scene opens with JouHn Brown seated in right foreground in front of easel, wearing along white artist blouse. He con- tinues to sound a few more notes on his flute, and then, laying it aside, takes up palette and brushes, and begins to paint. On the ground there are several small canvases leaning against his chair. Mrs. Brown—[Appearing in cottage window.| John, dear, how is the picture getting on? JoHn—Not very well, mother. Some days it’s so difficult. Mrs. Brown—Don’t fret over it, dear boy. [ Aside, with expression of sorrow, and eyes uplifted.| Ah, my poor child! My poor boy! [Disappears from win- dow. | Joun—[Dreamily.| If father were only here. He was the only one who could show me how. He always used to say: “Now, John, don’t get discouraged, and keep your mind on your picture, and some day you will be a great painter.”” I wonder why God took him and my little cousin Marie away. I loved my little cousin Marie somuch. She was so kind, and liked my pictures. She promised to marry me when I became a man. It takes so long to become a man. Perhaps I shall never become one now. I always think of her at this time, before the sun begins to go away. 129 Mumbo Jumbo [On road behind garden wall an automobile comes to a sudden stop and voices are heard. | First Man’s Votce—Damn the tyres, the dust, the Virgin, art, and everything! Szeconp Man’s Vorce—What wouldn’t I give for a cup of tea! First Man’s Vortcr—Let’s look in here. There must be a restaurant somewhere. [Clambering sounds are heard, and the heads of Isaac Koucretman and JosepH RosENGARTEN, wearing Red Cross army caps and automobile goggles, appear above high garden wall. They have evidently found something on which to mount. | KovcreLmMan—There’s a chap painting in the corner. RosENGARTEN—|[Suppressed voice.| Be careful! don’t let them see you. They’re awfully cranky about their privacy over here. We’re not in America, you know. KovucretmMan—Privacy! How about their public urinals? ‘That’s where privacy ought to be—in toilets, not in gardens! We don’t need walls in God’s own country. RosENcARTEN—The only privacy in America is in jails and asylums. [Seeing servant, they vanish sud- denly. | E.teN—[Appears on threshold of house, just in time to see the two heads disappear. With strong Irish brogue.| Americans sure! [Bell rings; she goes to open gate. | RosENGARTEN—|T'o Evuten.| Pardon, est-ce qu’il y a un restaurant dans le village? 130 Mumbo Jumbo Eiiren—lIf it’s a ristaurant you’re after wantin’, there’s none before you get to Belleville, about two miles along the high road. RosENGARTEN—Oh, I see! We’re looking for a cup of tea somewhere, while the chauffeur changes the tyre. KouceLMAN—We’ve just had a blow-out. Mrs. Brown—[Appearing on doorstep.| Ellen, what is it? ELLen—Two gintlemen, mum, asking for a ristorant. It’s busted their motor is, and they’re after a coop of tea. Mrs. Brown—[T'o gentlemen.]| Oh! Vm afraid you won’t get any tea in this little village; but won’t you wait in the garden? KovcetmMan—| Entering garden, followed by Rosrn- GARTEN.| That’s very kind! We’ve just burst a tyre. RosENGARTEN—What a lovely garden, and this little cottage—seventeenth-century, I should say. It’s most artistic. Mrs. Brown—My husband was an artist. RosENGARTEN—Oh, an artist! Is that your hus- band painting over there? [Looking towards Joun.| Mrs. Brown—[Embarrassed.| No—no, that’s my son. He—he—— RosENGARTEN—I’d so much like to see his canvas. [He starts to walk towards Joun. | KouceLMan—|Ingratiatingly.| We’re artists too, you know. RosENGARTEN—Well—hardly artists, but art lovers. Mrs. Brown—[T'roubled and confused.| Oh, you see—eh—well, you see—my son, he’s not very well— er—he’s never quite grown up—you understand. We 131 Mumbo Jumbo encourage him to paint—it’s the best distraction—and he seems to love it, the poor child. John, these gentle- men want to look at your picture. JoHn—[Who has remained oblivious to strangers looks up from work.| Yes, mother. [With sudden burst of childish enthusiasm.| You see, those are all trees marching along the river, for trees march, you know, up and down hill, like soldiers. And over here is the tree that is leading them, because he is so much older, and knows so much more. RosENGARTEN—|As if he were speaking to a little child.| I understand, my dear boy. He is the father tree, isn’t he? Joun—| Eagerly picking up another canvas.| Yes! Yes! and here is a picture with father in it. And these are the steps winding up to God, and flowers are all over everywhere. And you see up on the top of the steps is my little cousin Marie. And there is father looking out of the window. Mrs. Brown—| Under her breath.| Poor child! RosENGARTEN—Yes, of course; it’s very good, it’s very good indeed! I love pictures. Joun—Do you make pictures too? RosENGARTEN—No, we don’t make pictures; we make artists. [Glances at KoucELMAN. | Kovucretman—|[Under his breath.| I should say we did! JoHun—My father said I would be a great artist some day if I worked hard. RosENGARTEN— Yes, you will surely be a great artist some day, my dear boy.